Count of titles

The curve

I have just completed a retrieval from library catalogues giving a figure for poetry published in 2015. All the counts exclude anthologies.

2000 1079 titles
2010 1530 titles
2015 1350 titles
2019 1648 titles

I can see we have a dip in 2015. All the same, the figures have grown rather steeply since the 1990s.

We can draw a similar curve for the percentage of women poets in these single-author figures.

2000 38.8%
2010 36.1%
2015 40.3%
2019 45%

For comparison, figures for 1990 are 866 titles and 28.2% of them by women.
I discussed this issue with a group of interested parties, here in Nottingham. One associate was very excited to show us an essay from a poet in Ireland, saying that you could only get published if you knew people, and that it was useless to expect publication, so you should write for yourself. The associate was excited because this was what he already believed. I had done rather tiring catalogue work to recovered that figure of 1648 volumes of poetry by individual authors in one year. It really didn’t seem that they had all chanced to be friends of the editor. It seems, on the contrary, that there is a moment when a script arrives in an email, by someone you have never heard of, you read it and get excited because it is really good, and shows patterns you have never seen before, and you can't get enough of it.

One has to ask if this growth in the number of titles being issued could represent a decline in cultural creativity. This does not seem to be a possible conclusion.

One way of looking at the growth in titles is to consider that the count of books by white males would have gone down if the overall count had remained static. The growth allows for titles by white males to remain at the original level while socially other groups take up other portions of the pie.

There are several thousand people in the country who have published at least one book of poetry. The related number of unpublished poets (and of their unpublished books) has never been counted.
During 2024, the pace-making publisher Broken Sleep Books had a “window” for submitting pamphlets for possible selection by them. They emailed the unsuccessful applicants to say that they had received 880 submissions. (I am not sure if they had one or two windows during 2024.) I saw one of these, a friend in Nottingham received it. Interesting figure! We have to ask, first, were these all new scripts, or was at least one of them ten years old, and enduringly unpublished. Secondly, if you looked back in 2026, how many of them would have found publishers and so moved out of the category of “frustrated”, and so made the original account wrong or misleading. Thirdly, is this one in five of the striving and productive poets, or one in ten or one in twenty. I have no way of knowing.

War-weary

War-weary

I was reading Max Hastings’ overall history of the Second World War (“All hell let loose”, 2011). I was impressed by a remark about the rate of desertion on the Italian Front, by 1944; he has 30,000 soldiers ‘absent without leave’. I figure that the 8th Army was about 200,000 people and, given that many of them were artillery, line of communication troops, staff, catering, etc., this is a high proportion of all the combat troops. Hastings emphasises that it was the units facing imminent death, or also delayed death, who produced most of the deserters. They were the ones who had watched large numbers of their comrades die or get carried off on a stretcher. His wording is “The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men ‘on the trot’… Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944-5 […] and around half that number of Americans.” He also records “capital punishment was deemed politically unacceptable.”

This sheds a light on the New Romantic line of poetry. After all, the key to that movement was opposition to the war – starting from opposition to the State. And then to propaganda, to mobilisation, to directing culture towards “the morale of the Home Front”, etc. So, they were the party of not being militarist. I am used to thinking that they didn’t matter, because not enough people opposed the war, but it now looks as if they were on the wrong side because so many people didn’t want to fight, and the problem is that their party was far too large. I can't easily place myself on the side of the anarchist-pacifists.

Hastings stresses the legal difference between desertion and being “absent without leave”. He notes that "official war histories set the desertion figures much lower". This sounds like protecting a state secret. I think the point is that the senior officers were aware that it was the fighting men who had this problem. Desertion is a crime, subject to military law, which might imply execution. But these were actually the men who had won all the battles, from El Alamein on. So, you could have a large pool of people who weren’t reporting to their unit, weren't on parade, but weren't written up as illegally avoiding combat. I think it means this.

I have never seen anyone write about the desertion issue. I think we can talk about a lot of people being war-weary, certainly after D-Day, but probably after the end of the North African campaign. People saw victory on the way, but they had also had enough. This is when you see escapist films being made (the Gainsborough melodramas). You didn't really have a free press, and I can imagine that a journalist in Italy who used the phrase “war weary” would lose accreditation instantly, and just be sent home. I am wondering if the newspaper, back in London, would have printed the story. News was part of the war effort. So possibly there were plenty of journalists aware of this desertion issue, but they didn’t write up the story.
The questions around New Romanticism aren’t wholly about rhythm, imagery, etc., since really the issue was whether you believed 100% in the war effort and the State, or if you wanted to have a personal life and a personal space. But that exposition of “personal myth” as the sacred space of culture aroused mass hostility from people who also believed in the war effort, and who saw troops evading combat in Italy as the greatest threat to the country.
A page posted by Leeds University's Film Studies department says "After 1943 though, a violent swing against realism carried British cinema away from the war to the exoticism of the Gainsborough costume films, the spiv cycle and the whimsical nostalgia of Ealing comedy." The paper is by Robert Murphy, whose book on 40s British cinema I have read a couple of times. It identifies a return to the war theme in 1950, with "The Wooden Horse" and "Odette". I suppose we could define that date as the end of war-weariness. It is also when the New Romantic thing is agreed to have come to an end (or at least become marginal). This dissatisfaction in the last two years of the war is important also because it opened a space for people resisting being part of the Cold War Effort in the 1950s and 1960s.

My guess is that people, after 1945, wanted films to tell the stories which had been kept out of the newspapers during the war. A release of totalitarian strictures. None of the films did this, because the commercial weight was with depicting heroism, social unity under pressure, group coherence, etc. The films all identify the State with virtue and unity – with the voice of Society, in fact. They continued the melodies of wartime propaganda, even though they were made by private businesses, not by any arm of the State. Evidently, a lot of people didn’t share that memory. The films weren't very good, and faded away after 1960, although I don’t think disappointment was the only factor in this.
OK, some of those war films are worth watching. I certainly liked "Ice Cold in Alex" and "The Small Back Room." And "The Silent Enemy".

Hastings’ footnoting is unclear, but a source he does cite is a Brigadier R.A. Penney in ‘The Penney papers’, available in an archive. He does not cite a printed source, and I do not recall seeing any film or novel which tells this story of soldiers “absent from duty” in Italy in 1944-5, although it looks like one of the most interesting stories of the war. I wonder how they got home, how they were eventually mustered out, etc. I think the story with deserters around 1946 is that they were all amnestied and care was taken to avoid anyone being able to count them.

How norms get changed

I now feel unhappy with one chapter of ‘BF’ and I would like to add something to clarify it. It is the chapter “Language is made of rules”.

If you look at the vanity press sector, you find that the poets have ignored reforms made during the 20th C and are writing poetry which is out of date and which the contemporary audience just doesn't want. These are many people- I estimate that 1 in 3 of the poetry titles published in 1960 were vanity titles. There are several reforms which are basic to the scene. Clearly, the vanity poets, like other outsiders, reject these reforms – reject the right of editors (or, whoever it was!) to legislate such changes- and claim their right to protest and repeal these changes. It emerges, from the fact that the rules can be changed, that there are rules. This is what the chapter is about.
Moving away from vanity presses, it looks as if many under-published poets also regard the decisions of editors as enslaved to rules, and believe that those rules can be protested and repealed. I am more interested how the rules are enacted and updated. This is quite hard to recover. The indicative fact is someone publishing, in the 1970s, a book which adhered to styles which had been in fashion prior to 1912. The poet had not accepted the validity of decisions made after that.
It is striking that you can date a poem. This implies that there are stylistic changes which are collective. The norms of poetry change in the same way that the norms of a language change. But, of course, that only applies to insiders – outsiders were certainly writing poems in the style of 1910 during the 1970s.

Another tile in the pattern involves someone called Herbert Palmer. After Michael Roberts did the Faber Book of Modern Verse, Palmer wrote a book called Post-Victorian Verse (1938). He rejected Roberts’ master pattern. He included 83 poets discarded by Roberts - a list which is a good way of defining what Roberts did to the collective map. (Of course, he also covers a dozen poets whom Roberts includes.) My point is that Palmer’s book is two years after Roberts’. So he could have erased Roberts’ intervention. But clearly Roberts won. In some way, he was more persuasive, more eligible, closer to the ideal for the role of artistic judge.

Who said yes to Roberts? I don't think I can prove that there was a democratic process by which people voluntarily gave assent. It just seems that that is the most plausible explanation. Roberts didn’t have any institutional standing, he didn’t have a job which gave him power over anybody’s career. He was legitimated by the audience, not by an institution.

I think Roberts won the day, but I think it happened slowly. Allott’s 1962 anthology completely accepted Roberts. I think he saves one of the 83 whom Palmer had championed. (That is Edward Thomas.) But that is the historical gaze, it doesn't mean they vanished quickly, in 1937 or 1938.

I just wanted to establish this idea of legislation changing the rules. I am not really getting into the question of outsiders who reject the rules because they didn’t take part in making them. My belief is that editors accept poets which they like, and that they can predict what their readers will like. Argument is unproductive – you need to write poems which editors enjoy. It’s all about pleasure. You are not going to win an argument.
I suspect that outsider poets think that editors don't have the right to dislike their poems.

There is this question about learning the big stylistic shifts of the 20th C, their spread over the landscape. For example, the abolition of rhetoric, the ascent of modernism, the rise of free verse, the enlistment in the Cold War, the rise of Pop hedonism, etc. There are significant blocs of people who rejected any one of these changes. Maybe all of them! But, if you were reading poetry all the time, as part of your stable life-style, you would assimilate these features directly. They would just flow into you. The act of reading poetry may be narcissistic, but it it is primarily dual – you experience what the poet experiences. This is assimilation. My impression is that my goal was to find out what these people thought and felt. I achieved that goal, but in doing so I became just like them. If we turn back to the stylistic legislation, it looks like a sediment which the insiders all share. (By sediment I mean something which is left behind by the flow of something which is flowing all the time. It is what poetry leaves behind in your brain.) We buy into the changes of taste. Secondly, the vanity community experience these rules as hostile and irrational. In fact, they may well think that they are superior, artistically, to the fêted and favoured poems. I don't want to get into the litigation process. Life’s too short. But a lot of would-be poets certainly reject the selection process, and the ‘legislation’ which underpins it. So, at some level, these aesthetic judgements are like court judgements – open to protest. I am more interested in how the rules are enacted and updated. This is quite hard to recover.

It may well be that successful poets have gone through a long process of looking at published poems, considering why editors liked them, and applying that learning to their own work. This may actually be why they are successful. When you ask “Is this line good?”, it is important to know the right answer. This presents poets as highly socialised, rather than being “rugged individualists”, but maybe art is a very social thing and the whole category of non-social people cannot write good poetry. The problem may be invisible to them. They may not know whether their work is out of date.

Just one quote! I picked up Yeats’ 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, as a check. He has a poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, starting:

He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction's reach. His fortune then
Holds nothing secret, and Eternity,
Which is a mystery to other men,
Has like a woman given him its joy.

Clearly this is ridiculous now. And, it wasn’t ridiculous in 1936. If you posted such a poem to an editor today, in 2024, you would be laughed at. But, it is certain that people were still writing poems like this in the 1970s. It’s just that they weren’t getting into print. Maybe there were people who took Yeats as definitive and felt that Roberts was wrong – although collective taste has scrapped 90% of the poets whom Yeats picked up (and accepted almost all of Roberts’ picks). I apologise for quoting only one poem, when we could look at 1000 poems and still be finding new patterns. Blunt's poem does not rhyme because it is an imitation of Greek tragedy, whose verse does not rhyme.

I accept that poetry can be out of date. But, once you accept that, you accept that some agency can re-set norms. I believe that agency is the community of poetry readers. And I think their decisions are legitimate. But, at any stage, there is a category of people who write poetry but don’t identify with that community.

doubts and corrections

Miscellaneous blog/ error list

After signing off the proofs, I have realised that I wrote ‘Nicholas Spicer’ when the real spelling is ‘Nicolas’. Oh, shit.
John Kozak has supplied some details on the technical software terms used by Kevin Nolan in ‘Orlick’. "p 56

  plus the latest updates that find
  DSO battle ideograms, changing value of 1004 DWORDS

The only "DWORD" I know of in IT speak is an old Microsoft Windows internal usage for "double word", i.e. 2x16 bit words.

"DSO" could be "dynamic shared object" [*], a file containing code and/or data which can be pulled in as a program is running.   Such objects are typically used to extend or customise a program.  For example,  new icons or "skins" for a multiplayer game, "battle ideogram"?"

p 91

  "Zeiss were a famous maker of lenses and optical equipment in Jena"

Still are, I think.

Actually, after 1946 there was a Zeiss firm in West Germany, while the original, in East Germany (and in Jena), was state-owned. So the tie to Jena is not totally accurate. Their cameras were all made in Dresden... but one could qualify this statement forever.

Ian Heames writes to say:
The three-part poem-designating numbers currently in place under the indented quotations are accurate, but since the same numbering system is used for all three sequences collected in Arrays (i.e. Array One, To, and A.I. In Daylight all run from 1.1.1 to 3.3.3), any given three-part number could equally lead a reader to more than one other text rather than the text being quoted from. It might therefore make sense to attribute the indented quotations as follows:

p. 260:

     [2.1.1, p. 18 (Array One)]

p. 262:

     [1.1.1, p. 9 (Array One)]  

p. 263:  

     [2.1.3, p. 20 (Array One)]

With regards to including page numbers and sequence titles, either/or would work for navigating to the desired page, although including the sequence name might offer more of a bird's-eye view of the fact that the first of the three sequences in Arrays is the one principally under consideration.

If it'd also be possible for the attribution to follow after an empty line, to separate it from the poem text, that'd be appreciated, as the poems are choppy enough that un-spaced material could be mistaken for a continuation of the text itself.  

For the same reason, I've used square brackets for the attributions above (since the poems themselves make use of round brackets, as in the example on your p. 262).  

To triple-lock the disambiguation, the attribution line could perhaps in all cases also be deeper indented than the quoted text (as it is already on pp. 260 and 262, but not currently on p. 263).

I've also included very abbreviated references -- simply the page number in round brackets -- to the other, embedded, quotations, in case it'd be possible to add those in, as again that'd help a reader get to the material in question.

--

--

p. 261  

"Intact RQ-170 Sentinel body image", twice. correct to:  

"intact RQ-170 Sentinel body image", twice (pp. 16; 30).  

[The intervention regarding the initial capital letter is simply so that the page references can follow in sequence order. On p. 30, the line starts with a capital letter, but not p. 16.] 

--

“Exclusively peaceful metalloid cartouche butterfly” (p. 30)

--

‘recall how/ the RCP-120 would lose/ ammo to go clear”  

correct to:  

"recall how/ the RCP-120 would lose/ ammo to go clear” (p. 17)

[The quotation currently opens with a single rather than double inverted comma.]

--

My left thumb is so sore from tilting those worlds.

[Interesting to see this in italics! I really like the effect! With the formatting transformed, it's probably best left unattributed, so no intervention needed.]

--

p. 262  

  [first line of indented quotation:]

(  

correct to:  

)

[The round bracket should be closing rather than opening.]

--

The endpapers have a rather beautiful, originally painted, shimmering image

[That's nice of you to say! I should possibly mention that the endpapers were made in MS Paint, so 'digitally painted' might be a better fit than 'originally painted', but of course it's entirely your call!]

--

“orchid floods butterfly// orchid floods orchid/ with butterfly [...] it was a butterfly/ orchid” (p. 12)

--

“had had bliss from training/ had had bliss form/ seraphic droid epaulet” (p.10)  

--

starting with "Omega chrome Blue"

correct to:

starting with "Omega Chrome Blue"

(end of email) (this arrived several weeks after the book had been printed) (do I want to supply page numbers for every poem...no)

After looking at Wayne Burrows’ website, I am inclined to say that I missed a nuance in his double-poem which combines the funeral of M Thatcher with the funeral of Kim Jong-Il. He records a report from the Korean Central News Agency which describes supernatural phenomena linked with the departure from mortal form of Kim Jong-Il – and suggests that a similar belief in miracles and the intervention of supernatural forces was a feature of the celebration by Tory press and politicians of Thatcher's transfiguration. Indeed, these speakers attributed economic miracles to Her intervention in our humble lives.
Today we stand in the glow of cleansing propaganda
while peculiar natural wonders are observed
on Mt. Paektu, Jong Il Peak
and Tonghung Hill in Hamhung City,
in the transparent glare of white light shining
from the stones of Parliament Square and Westminster.

At this point I feel that every sentence in the book could be more accurate. This is an unavoidable stage in the creation of a book, and of course the book would be twice as long if I re-explained everything.

Schubert. I blithely say that Schubert's music was designed for small, intimate, groups, but that could hardly be true of his Symphonies, and he wrote nine. A lot of his music was only heard in performance in small rooms for private parties, but not all. If he wrote very simple lieder, those could be delivered in concert-halls to large audiences, giving all those people the impression of intimacy. A lot of his music was published in his lifetime, even if he was so prolific that a lot of his music was not taken on by publishers (and was printed from manuscripts up to forty years after his death in 1828). The retreat to the small-scale is not directly or certainly linked to political oppression making the public realm gleaming and empty. The link is of a mythic kind. What I wrote captures the myth, I suppose. Mellors wrote a sequence of poems about an imaginary East German poet who wrote a sequence of poems adapting or parodying the sequence of poems which Schubert set to music as Die Winterreise, but really the work is not about East Germany or Schubert.

I say at p.83 that there are 84 poets in Identity Parade, but the real count is 85. I think there are very few mistakes in the text, after I spent a year editing it. The publisher sent me a spreadsheet of quotes I had used which had 116 rows... I took on a lot of different poets, and the logistics of that were formidable. I have just looked at an exercise I did to count how many of the IP poets had studied in some way at Oxford or Cambridge... I came to a figure of 27%. I suppose the great issue of our period, or perhaps only up until a few years ago, was the attack on meritocracy. The popularity of UKIP relied on channelling such an attack. Anyway, the figure of 27% shows a continuing reduction, as a share of the whole, so the "widening of the apex" which is my thesis. People now seem keen to suppress the fact that they were selected for a great university - I may have to abandon my count project, since if people are unhappy about their biography it is intrusive to probe into it. I suppose that, if you do well in an exam, you have concentrated for three hours. Most people can't do that. If you have high verbal intelligence and can concentrate for three hours, that would seem like good equipment for writing a poem. I think meritocracy is working really well for an increasing number of 18 year-olds - just not for all of them.

Info has come in from Wayne Burrows to the effect that there was a “break” in the central areas of poetry about ten years ago. A loss of confidence. This is what produced the present set-up, with its pluralism and lack of normative focal points. I find this interesting because there is a lack of dates in my account. I come up with a stretch of roughly 30 years without many events. Wayne came up with a change at Poetry Review (I think he said this but maybe I did) and a change at Faber, with them getting rid of a set of people and signing up Sam Riviere, who is conceptual and internet-oriented and altogether a new thing. So this is worth discussing.
My feel is that you could have a new-style Poetry Review because there were already hundreds of poets at work who were writing the poems which PR could pick up. So there was a process before that Event… arguably the process is big and the Event is small. And Faber are respected, but they are possibly 1% of the titles coming out. I am not sure if you can screen out the other 99% to any great extent. I can see that the version of P Review edited by Emily Berry was a breakthrough, but that was from 2015, I think, and there was a Maurice Riordan phase between Sampson leaving and Berry starting. I haven’t read the Riordan issues so I haven’t made my mind up. (There were a couple of guest editors too, like Bernardine Evaristo and Charles Boyle.) If I had to pick One Big Thing it would be the regime of Robert Potts and David Herd at Poetry Review. 2003-5, I think. They definitely caused shock and made Top People say “I’m not against change but you’re moving too fast”.
The version of the mainstream which I detest was breaking up during the 1980s… it just wasn't being taken up by younger poets. It didn’t just stop but it was fading, year by year. So I think there was a process of moving towards pluralism which involved the audience, and the poets, and the critics, and the publishers. And the retailers, I suppose. But I don’t see major events or things changing in a single year. It was a broad process. And I think pluralism is really stable. You knock it over and it still works a different way up.
If you accept that Emily Berry was a star editor, it might follow that she gives a misleading impression of sudden change and improvement. She didn’t write the poems, but she gave them the air, and other editors wouldn't do that. Conversely, someone else might want to give the impression that nothing was changing, so that older poets weren't slipping out of date and into inactivity. They would conceal underlying artistic changes. This is problematic. I think Berry was a star editor, so the conclusion might be that things hadn’t changed that much between 2010 and 2015.
Staring at individual poems in a magazine can be frustrating, as you don’t see any pattern at all. But if you read several hundred pages, a low-resolution pattern emerges. Probably. But with P Review, there are sudden changes when an editor leaves.

chapter list

Beautiful Things Happening To Sensitive People

Screen grabs of British poetry in the 21st century

due out from Shearsman amazingly soon
sneak preview of chapter list
Introduction
Generalisations about the poetry world
Theories of style time
Language is made of rules
Foundation Texts (Loving Little Orlick; Ffynhonnau Uchel; Englaland; Incendium Amoris; Cloud. A coffee cantata)
Identification
Their Trajectory Was Just Large (Flatlands; Terrain Seed Scarcity; Implacable Art; Unsung; Birdhouse; a.m.; The President of Earth; The Itchy Sea; Capital; The Hutton Inquiry; Natural Histories; Vacation of a Lifetime; Andraste's Hair; Galatea; The Missing; The Midlands; The Land of Green Ginger)
Cultural Asset Management
Verticegarden (Octet; Nekorb)
Insignificance; or, Structure Engulfed by Surface
Poems On Communal Wellbeing (Songs for Eurydice; Black Sun; Winstanley; Surge)
Local Knowledge (Birds of the Sherborne Missal; A Portland Triptych)
Serial: Lost In Data Labyrinths (The School of Forgery; Winter Journey; Exotica Suite)
Short Strings, Polyrecombinant (Duetcetera)
Splendours And Chagrins (Rendang; Plague Lands and other poems; Amnion; Katabasis; Writing The Camp)
Devolution/ Disassembly:
Anglo-Welsh (Edge of Necessary; stenia cultus handbook; Keinc; King Driftwood)
Scottish poets (Zonda? Khamsin? Sharaav? Camanchaca?; Hand Over Mouth Music; Florilegium; The Sleep Road; makar /unmakar)
British South Asian poets (Brilliant Corners; Small Hands; The Voice Of Sheila Chandra; The Routines)
West-bloc dissidents: alternative poetry (Arrays; Lines on the Surface; INSTANT-fLEX 718)
Triumphs And Panics (Ephemeris; False Flags; Somnia; Makers Of Empty Dreams; Forms of Protest; Self Heal; The Cook's Wedding)
The Human Voice (rabbit; Beautiful Girls; Venusberg; Rookie; Soft Sift; Kim Kardashian's Marriage)
Pistachio Euphoria Sorbet (the arboretum towards the beginning; Leave Bambi Alone)
Sociolinguistics (Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy‑Machine!!!; Wilia; Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues; Northern Alchemy; Unquiet)
Privatisation And Religion (The Palace of Oblivion; Ascension Notes; Monica’s Overcoat Of Flesh; Stranger In The Mask Of A Deer)
Land And Sea (Disappearance; Green Noise; Continental Drift; Else)
Bibliography

other sources for modern poetry

Notes on other sources for modern poetry; or, what have we here?

I have just finished proof-reading Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People. In the book, I don’t discuss other critics of recent poetry. This is a function which people might ask my book to carry out, so I thought to make amends in a limited way by making a few notes here, on my blog. I expect to be criticised for not recording the consensus, but what I am suggesting is that there is no consensus - not for 1000 poets publishing after 2000, and not yet.

Helen Ivory/ George Szirtes. ‘In their own words’. 2012. Contains prose statements by sixty poets on their own work. I didn’t think most of the poets were very talented and so I only find about eight of these pieces really interesting. But those eight are vital.

Jon Thompson. The Encounter. A handbook of poetic practice. 2022. A set of essays by 30 poets about how they came to write their works. Most of these are Americans, anyway Thompson clearly has enough knowledge of his subjects to pick only ones who can write incredibly interesting prose – because things are actually happening in their brain, I suppose. The average level of these pieces is incredibly high. I rewrote one of my essays (in BF) directly because the information in The Encounter was so good.
I didn’t go on to read the American poets, because if there are 1000 talented British poets then I have to focus, like an athlete in training. This isn’t the best possible thing for me. Maybe I can finish my project and then time will arrive on its own. The title refers to "unexpected encounters ... that come to shape what gets to be written."

Fiona Sampson, Beyond the lyric. 2012. This covers about 70 poets of the time, one of them having made a debut after 2000. I wasn't interested in most of these poets. It doesn't stand as a guide to the new century. (The one exception is Ahren Warner.) The book stands, for me, as an illustration of how much people differ; the full spectrum includes a great range of reactions I don’t have. Sampson is preoccupied with approval, and at times is more interested in the patron-poet relationship than in whether the poems are any good. That duet of anxiety and validation. Evidently, the situation with thousands of (at least) competent poets hoping every opportunity will be theirs (and not Yours) brings anxiety to centre stage -and the means of assuaging it.
Allott’s anthology (1918-60) included a 60% share for Oxford and Cambridge poets. It may be that he thought validation of that kind made everything feel superior and secure. I am wondering if Sampson feels the same way: validation is such a key moment in the social process, and for her being validated by some editor at a High Street firm is a moment of transformation which is endlessly fascinating. So, we are asked to enjoy being in the company of Top People, rather than evaluate poems, their texture and symbolism. Perhaps the idea that you were giving time to someone who Wasn’t Validated causes anxiety and the close-down of aesthetic experience, like a bath growing cold. I've got to say that a lot of people who can write poetry don't give off waves of affluence and security.
There is a brief mention of Martinez de las Rivas, who did debut post 2000 - he had only published one pamphlet at that time. I think the count of poets debuting after 1990 but before 2000 might be three.

prose snapshots in Identity Parade, the anthology edited by Roddie Lumsden, 2010. A comparison with Sampson is interesting. Lumsden includes debuts after 1995, and 85 people, of whom only three feature in Sampson's book. The conclusion is that Sampson was dealing with an older generation and had just not taken on a new generation, 15 year-groups or however you count it. Lumsden's collection is a milestone for that reason, that he has given an image of those year-groups. However, his prose comments are inane. he explicitly refers to Lucie-Smith as a model, but Lucie-Smith's comments in his 1970 anthology are cogent, brilliant, get to the core, point to flaws. Lumsden is too political to say anything interesting. And 'Dear World' is a much better anthology.

John Matthias. British poetry at Y2K. A long essay which appeared on the internet, and is now collected in a book of his essays. Certainly worth arguing with. Matthias selected the anthology “23 British poets”, in 1971 I think, which Mottram used as the basis for his “British Poetry Revival” essay in 1974. He may be the only American who understands British poetry. The essay relates to the year 2000, so it has become less relevant as years have gone by – I certainly found it interesting, though.

Robert Sheppard. Several books about the London School or a fraction of the London School. Not about poetry after about 1995. His big idea is Indeterminacy, which was the subject of his doctoral thesis, which itself was about Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood – poets who were at their prime in the 1960s. It is relevant to the 21st century but not very salient. This material probably is very high quality help in thinking about poets like Maggie O’Sullivan and Adrian Clarke.

Luke Roberts, Glacial decoys. It doesn’t mention duck hunting and it isn’t about glaciers. Has firm judgements without much reasoning supplied. It is perfectly honest, which is better. This certainly saves time. The judgements are enlightening. It gives us modern poetry as “present time”, how it feels to live through it. I wouldn't say it is a typical story, but nothing you can find is typical, so that isn’t a criticism. Ths is extremely interesting to read.

Reviews in Poetry Review. I have just gone through 7 issues of PR looking at the reviews. I don’t find them very helpful and I am not sure why that is. The choice of who to review reflects “collective knowledge” of people who talk to the editor of Poetry Review, so that is a good indicator: if you take 100 reviews in the magazine, at least half of them will be of poets you want to know about. I suspect the problem is that the reviewers are actually playing the game: they can see dozens of other players in front of them and flanking them, they take in all the information, but they don’t want to do a negative view because there might be repercussions and they are too much “on the pitch” to be blind to those. So, also, they don’t want to give a rave review, because that would promote the other poets, whose book it is, over their heads. They would lose standing. At the same time, they have lots of very relevant, new, timely, information, which they reveal almost by accident. The ground tone is enthusiastic because the business wants visible enthusiasm, to encourage the customers. PR doesn't run very many negative reviews, not in the course of a year or even ten years. But also, my feel is that quite a few books every year deserve Rave Reviews, and they don’t get them.
PR employ people who are in the game, not people with detachment and distantiation.
I haven’t got exact figures on this, but my grasp is that PR edited by Fiona Sampson was generous to older poets, and editors since she left have been almost totally focussed on new poets (or, at least, poets under 40). The youth focus is undoubtedly more stimulating. And I think the business has gone in this direction. As I have, personally, with Beautiful Feelings.

Martin Stannard. The big headline here is Raworth's “Letter to Martin Stannard”, where he explains how he writes. This was a response to a Stannard review, no doubt. You can find Martin’s more recent reviews on the internet, usually. There is a collected volume but it stops in 2000.
Martin was editor of Joe Soap’s Canoe from some point in the Seventies or early Eighties, and his big enthusiasm then was as a fan of the New York School. In comparison with the NYS, he finds English poetry anti-intellectual, slow, un-self-aware, pedestrian, etc. Big surprise, right? He doesn't have the same commitment to any faction in the British scene. I always find his reviews substantial, he spends a long time with each text and discusses what he actually finds, not who the poet is allied with.

Statements in the “best British poetry” series. This series of annual anthologies (halting after the fifth volume, in 2015) included statements by poets (at the back). This might seem insubstantial, but actually a lot of these pieces are very informative. People stopped being defensive, for some reason. It’s not a matter of the word count, but actually this is maybe 160 pages altogether. Maybe the lesson is that an editor/critic doesn't need to say anything, but just to persuade people to loosen up.

The Waterloo Book of Contemporary Poetry. Simon had a plan for a book which wrote about 1000 contemporary poets. This never happened, for obvious logistical reasons and some less obvious ones too. If you check out the Poetry Book Society website, over 5 years they have 1000 books (I counted 1140) and a write-up for each one. So the “thousandfold book” exists at that level. And it is the format best suited to guiding people around modern poetry. You would only get 200 words for each poet: "Poeticules will get 50-100, normally I'd say 200-300 for less-known, less gifted or prominent poets, larger reputations or of real interest 700, and Hill, well I was going to say 1200." I found this format frustrating, but after some effort I realised that you can say a lot in 200 words once you have formed a clear judgement. And, if you can’t do that, you are in the wrong business. I really wish this book existed. I think the weakest point was wanting to have a career survey of everybody, that was a bridge too far: it works so much better if you take one book and write about what you can hold in your hand. Norman Jope emailed "As for the number of authors featured, 1000 is an understandable target but I suspect, on the basis of my knowledge of the Plymouth scene and the sheer number of names that crop up more widely, that you could go well over that number and still not capture everybody who's had a presence[.]"
My job would be so much easier if I had a book like this as a start point. Of course, it’s evident that you actually want two such books so that you can get access to different points of view, so you can do a comparison of sources. The project would need people (and these might be the half-dozen people Simon initially contacted) to argue about who should be included, so that the finished prose would emerge from that discussion.
By chance, I have a copy of PR from 1996. In that issue is a letter from Kathleen Jamie, complaining that Sheenagh Pugh had written a less than adulatory review of a female poet (Eavan Boland). Jamie was indignant. She thought you couldn’t possibly give a bad review of a bad female poet. She hadn't given permission for this to happen. Pugh replied, in the next issue, neatly flicking Jamie over the boundary. To be truthful, PR probably hasn't run even one negative review of a person of femaleness since 1996. Not everybody wants to be honest. If you have 4000 books by female poets coming out in that time, were they all good? I submit the answer is no.

PR has probably run north of 2000 reviews since 1996. That is your “thousandfold book”, in physical but disconnected form. You could collect all those reviews, but nobody would think that is a good idea. Not everyone is called Sheenagh Pugh, and not every reviewer has any intention of answering the question “what have we here?”

Steve Spence. Reviews widespread but not collected – I have seen a file which does collect them all, a hundred or so. It would really be helpful if these were collected as a book. Steve doesn’t like giving negative reviews, but he is committed to modern poetry, not to something from 50 years ago or 80 years ago. Some of these are on-line at Litter, a magazine edited and run here in Nottingham.

Random interviews. Don’t have a mother lode of these but obviously there are quite a few on the Internet. Of especial interest, I found three (I think it was three) interviews with Toby Martinez de las Rivas. He is a very good interview subject and these were vital to writing sensibly about him.

Robert wanted to tell me how much he'd updated his positions since 2005. This is the chapter list for his new book:
Introduction: Form, Forms and Forming
1. Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practice
2. Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Sonnet Sequence
3. Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter Hughes’ Petrarch
4. Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure
5. Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney
6. Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms and Palimpsest Prose
7. The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed
8. Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theater of Semantic Poetry
9. The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher
10. Geraldine Monk’s Poetics and Performance: Catching Form in the Act
11. Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs

Place debuted after 2000, I think, and is American, but none of the others did. So, this isn't going to get us very far with 21st century poetry. I am sure that older poets have a more legitimate aura - but that is because critics have written about them. This isn't a great argument for not writing about young poets.

Hooker on Place. Right after finishing the proofing, I received a copy of Hooker’s book Art of Seeing which includes a new statement of the history of poetry about place. “During this period [post-war and in England, AD] there has been an upsurge of English poetry associated with place in Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, Roy Fisher’s City, and Donald Davie’s Essex Poems; in Jack Clemo's Cornish poems and Charles Tomlinson's poems set in Gloucestershire; in the work of CH Sisson, Michael Hamburger, Ted Hughes, Paul Hyland, Molly Holden, Kim Taplin, John Welch and other poets. The American poets John Matthias and Ronald Johnson have drawn on native resources in their seeing of place[.].” This is not especially complete, but it does offer a new way of thinking about landscape poetry. Hooker lived in Wales and evidently had in mind the Welsh idea of bro which is both a community and a district, made up of places. This is distinct both from the older humanist way of writing about beautiful landscapes, and the post-humanist view of Nature as alien to humanity. I am not familiar with the name Paul Hyland but have ordered his selected poems (2004) via the second-hand market.

Beautiful Feelings - footnote

Autism was defined clinically by two people, Kanner and Asperger. I wrote about Haley Jenkins, an autistic poet, in my new book. Her book is nekorb. One of the psychiatrists was in the USA, and the other was in Vienna and delivered “incurable” children over to the SS for eugenic murder. I found out at about 9 pm Iast night (in June 2023) that I had got the names the wrong way round – exchanging Kanner for Asperger. This is catastrophic. I was quite distracted by the need to fix the text and I have done so now.
I was interested to discover that the accepted version, whereby Kanner and Asperger discovered the same cluster of symptoms independently, and Lorna Wing put the two patterns together in 1981, to create the modern theory, is wrong. Two Jewish doctors, Weiss and Frankl, were working and researching in Asperger’s clinic and fled to the USA. And there they worked for Leo Kanner. One of them had published the pioneer paper on autism, not yet called that, in 1935. Kanner never mentions this, but he must have heard these ideas, and so he must have known what Asperger had discovered. But it is not certain that the breakthrough is due to Asperger (rather than to Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl, or perhaps a group study at the Heilpädagogik clinic).
Asperger's famous paper only dealt with highly functional people on the spectrum. Steve Silberman suggests that, in 1944, the need was to protect the subjects from eugenic murder, and so that he picked out the rather functioning children, and left out anybody lower down the spectrum. So there is no separate Asperger’s Syndrome, it is just a spectrum, and always was.

I found out today that the + marks in Jenkins’ poem relate to marks which Asperger made on notes delivered to the killing-clinic - + meant “incurable” and this meant in context “give this child a lethal injection”. Interesting, but how on earth would you know this unless you have actually read about that exact phase of history.

have you heard of our neurotribe?
to create concrete Utopias
drill it like cars or copper
unconscious need to be created
in mid-walk
at the end of each trip
you get back to dream-work

- I don’t know what this means, but that is exactly like any other book from Veer. I don’t think you can describe every avant garde poet as autistic. Just because they don’t care whether you can understand them or not.

“While Catel conveniently went on vacation, one of his subordinates murdered the baby with an injection as the nurses took their coffee break.” - - the baby mentioned was Gerhard Kretschmar. The last 7 words are also the title of one of Jenkins’ poems.

It may be helpful to quote a article in Molecular Autism:
"We will not repeat the evidence and main findings of Herwig Czech’s article here but will note that the conclusion concur with a new book on this topic, published in 2018, by Edith Sheffer, and entitled Asperger’s Children: The origins of autism in Nazi Vienna. Like Czech, Sheffer compellingly makes the case that Asperger willingly became a cog in the Nazi killing machine, referring children both directly and indirectly to Am Spiegelgrund. 
Sheffer, following Steve Silberman and John Elder Robison, also mentions the fact that Georg Frankl, a staff physician at the clinic, and the psychologist Anni Weiss, had already published on cases similar to those later described as “autistic psychopaths” before Asperger. Because Frankl and Weiss were Jewish, they were forced to leave Austria and went to the US, where they married shortly after their arrival. As Asperger's understanding of autism surely drew on their work and observations, and later helped inspire Lorna Wing to define the scope of the autism spectrum, Frankl and Weiss deserve credit for contributing to the modern understanding of autism."

A review of Edith Sheffer's book in the Daily Mail on-line reports "And yet Asperger encouraged other doctors to refer children to Spiegelgrund and he even sent patients there directly from his own clinic. He was a close colleague of Erwin Jekelius, who began the war as director of the Steinhof asylum, where he oversaw the deaths of around 4,000 adults judged superfluous to Nazi requirements.

Jekelius’s activities were notorious. In October 1940, a demonstration outside the Steinhof was broken up by the police and the SS. Even the British knew what he was doing. The RAF dropped leaflets on Vienna in September 1941, warning citizens: ‘Jekelius haunts the corridors of Steinhof… in a white doctor’s coat with his syringe. He does not bring new life to the ill, but death.’

Beautiful Feelings – another blog

We are still (30/07/24) in the stage of acquiring permissions to use quotes. (I think we started on 9 May, based on file creation dates.) Much argument in the past few days about the spelling of Shetlandic. This is exhausting. I can deal with people saying no but it is harder where people don’t reply at all. After all, we need all the permissions. If three are missing we can't publish the book at all. The old Society of Authors guidelines were clear but the new ones are vague to the point of being unusable. Tony found some guidelines which we could apply, but unfortunately they added eleven more poets whom I had thought we didn’t need to contact. The book was announced for July, but it is hard to foresee when we will complete, evidently not before the end of university holidays, when people not opening emails will come back from the seaside and start opening them. I am very busy rewriting pieces to remove the quotes and replace them with analytical descriptions. The problem is less with people saying no than with people “off the scene” whom we can’t contact and can’t get consents out of.
Update 10/8/24. We only have one permission left now, and Tony is keen to give up on that if we don’t get a reply by Monday. I spent yesterday writing extra text to fill in if we don’t get a reply and so can’t use the quotes.

I disgraced myself by giving a wrong gloss to one of the Shetlandic words. ‘ayre’ which I thought was ‘earth’ (which woud be ‘yird’) but is actually a shingle beach, and probably cognate with the eyr in Eyrbyggjasaga, a story about the dwellers in Snæfellsnes, a ness in Iceland. I couldn’t find this in the Scots Thesaurus, but it does say that ‘shingle’ can be either ‘chingle’ or ‘jingle’.

Sledmere replied with an agreement, fortunately, saying “I enjoyed reading this. Some context for Leave Bambi Alone was that it was written almost entirely on Christmas Day while staying at the family home of a former lover's. The re-gendering of Bambi was deliberate (something I play with in another unpublished work). I have never seen Meet Me in St. Louis! Possibly because I am somewhat allergic to musicals… But! I enjoy a love story.”
She can’t have written 1600 lines all in one day, but anyway this detail points to a completely new approach to the gap between everyday life and a text, which is also a different sense of time. Personally I think this new approach is completely successful. The task for a critic is to adjust the collective sense so that it is running at the right speed and can accept the poetry… no good playing a 33 1/3 record at 45 rpm. This new Scottish thing and the work of British Asian poets are the two new things which I have found. They are new islands, as opposed to plants on an existing island evolving into new forms. I have to add that the British Asian poets are very diverse from each other, my point is simply that these are ways of conducting the text which weren't around in the 1990s and aren't just variants of something else. I don’t want to say “this is what’s happening” and so make everything else look unimportant, but something has changed.

I saw some discussion in an on-line forum, about Poetry Review in fact. What I saw was a very wide diversity of opinions but also ideas about other people on the scene, about the scene as a set of several thousand people, which were very non-factual.
One of the contributors regretted that modern poetry had lost connection with traditional poetry. He basically couldn't read modern poetry and was still hearing the patterns of nineteenth-century verse. Modern poems were failed traditional poems, in the way he heard them. “I try as hard as possible to extend maximal charity to those with different tastes than my own, on the presumption that they see things I miss, but it does seem a shame that a body with such an explicit mission to promote the totality of poetry elevates so strongly forms that have cut ties with essentially all English verse prior to about 1920 and much of what comes after.” The situation here is that there was a new set of patterns, around 1925 or even 1910, and most people absorbed them and actually became able to hear new patterns as meaningful. And poets in 2024, or years leading up to 2024, write in new patterns expecting that readers are going to be able to follow them. I just find it baffling that someone is so rigid that they can’t learn new patterns, even after 100 years. But maybe it’s even simpler, this person never reads modern poetry and actually never has read it. They want to make massive generalisations about modern poetry and they have never read an entire book of it.
I think if you read modern poetry you just soak up the patterns, but the flaw in that is that someone who never starts doesn't get very far. And the flaw in explaining modern poetry is that people quite probably won’t read the explanations. So here you have someone who wants to cling onto their ignorance as if to some colony. Would you ask TV to preserve all the conventions of theatre as it was in 1920? I don’t suppose you would. Anyway, the count of people who read books but can’t read modern poetry is probably larger than the number of people who read modern poetry.

The on-line discussion was about dissatisfaction with Poetry Review, and surprisingly the topic was not how middle of the road it was, but how specialised and extreme it was, and how they couldn't follow the poems. So possibly the centre of poetry, where the management sit, is surrounded by a dozen or so areas of people who feel cut off and ignored. And where I would incline to see “the mainstream” as one unified thing, whose priority is to simplify and to remove deep context, the people in this forum saw it as the product of 50 years of innovation, and they wanted the scene to return to where it was before this kind of modernity had come on stage. And, where the range of poetry being published is so vast that it seems everyone can migrate to the area which suits them down to the tiniest detail, there is a set of people who are unhappy with what they read, feel frustrated, and don’t know where to find what they like.

I have been analysing events as a process in which people pursue their tastes, the field subdivides, poetry becomes more specialised and more consistent in satisfying its own market, and everything gets more and more evolved. But a forum like this shows people finding difficulty with the poems they are seeing, and wanting something less specialised and more mundane. Where arts administrators like poems to be about identity politics, and to explore the existential situation of, let’s say, a transgender person, as a privileged outcome, because that offers a depth of unfamiliar experience, some readers may find the unfamiliar life situation baffling and repellent, and wish for something much less dense in information. And easier to get at. Some readers may wish for more respect for privacy in a poem, less psychological revelation. And, in line with that, they may wish for a poem to have less artistic depth, and to be less evolved in its direction.
It looks as if some of the market defines ‘identity poems’ as “a film in which one character does not stick to their lines but makes up endless new lines so that none of the other characters gets a chance to speak”. After a while, that single voice becomes irritating and you would do anything to have it shift to someone else. The idea that exposure to one character gives a deeper and more involving experience does not work for them. They would prefer less depth and more variety. The proposal of briefly becoming someone whose experience is quite unlike theirs does not sell to them. They would rather not make that effort and they rather resent it.
I can’t exploit this, because I so much like poetry moving in the opposite direction. My point is more that the market is radically divided and there is no consensus for me to describe, or critique either. I would like to write a book for everybody, but you can't record a consensus if there isn’t one. So I guess my book can work as providing better information, which may displease some of the participants but which will move the arguments on in every case.

I looked again at the on-line accounts of the 2013 plagiarism scandal (or scandals). They are extremely satisfactory and there is no point me rehashing the story. One chat site has some unreflected comments (so nothing like a good source account) on the plagiarism of Matthew Welton’s great poems, where one of their people says “It seemed like a lot more than merely the insertion of synonyms. The ... er ... revised poem was quite a bit better than the drab thing the original author wrote. Not great but better.” This is such an unexpected reaction. The commentator also says in rather a snitty way that poems like this invite plagiarism. I have no idea what that means. I am quoting this just to show how diverse reactions are. To repeat myself, I can’t tell people how they are going to react so my criticism has to have more modest goals.
I notice Ira told me “I've not done much anti plagiarism work since [...]2016.” So the lack of new uncoverings since then may be due to lack of economic investment. But what I conclude from Ira’s amazing detective work is that maybe 5 in 1000 visible poets were copying/ abusing when a powerful lens was applied. And those 5 all stopped. So it isn’t a big problem.
One of the people generally conceded to have copied is quoted on the internet saying he has written 500 poems in the last eight or nine years, and he doesn't want to face the chore of going back and determining which ones he hadn’t written (& which ones he had, obviously). This just goes to show what strange states of mind people wander into. 500 poems? What for?

Music Hall

Music hall

There is a comment (p. 51) in Ian MacDonald's classic work on The Beatles, Revolution in the Head, about how future pop musicians learnt music hall songs: “During the Fifties, parents still sang music hall songs to their children”. This solves a problem of chronology: so many critics have attributed the English part of English pop music (in an Afro-American style, essentially) to the music hall heritage, but the music halls were going out of business in 1920. They were replaced by “Variety” and the thrust was to bring in a more affluent audience which would spend more money both on tickets and on drinks. The working class were pushed out. So I always wondered how someone born in 1942 could ever have heard these songs.
MacDonald has supplied the answer. The songs were simple enough for the audience to sing along with them, at least in the choruses, and so people remembered them, and so they became part of a family stock of amusement, a heritage of the amateur. The most vivid account of this I have read is Ray Davies recalling that his family used to have parties where they sang all evening, presumably music hall songs to a great extent. That is where Ray Davies came from, everyone knows that. That is why he didn’t sound like an American. MacDonald is quite aware that this basis of collective song with its humour, eccentricity, boldness, and sharing, disappeared during the 1960s and was not there for children born after about 1960. It was the basis for the “English sound” but it was evaporating because its performance base had been got rid of around 1915 to 1925.

Cream covered “Your baby has gone down the plughole”. “it seems to have been written in 1944 by Elton Box, Desmond Cox and Lewis Ilda, under the collective pseudonym Jack Spade, though it’s possible that it’s older…” This is an example of many detailed problems of chronology. This song sounds a lot older than 1944, but it could have been a conscious pastiche. Anyway the style is pure music hall and this is something which an American band would never have dreamed of. It is not exactly Cream’s finest hour, more an album filler. This is just one of many bemusing problems of dating. “Maggie Mae” sounds like a music hall song to me, but it actually dates to around 1830, which is why it refers to Maggie being transported, a punishment which came to an end in 1840. It was an old song which people within the Folk Revival dug up in printed archives. It was then sung in folk clubs, the future Beatles hung out in every kind of club, they picked it up and remembered bits of it for the 1969 sessions for ‘Get back’. So when music hall started it used a style which was already familiar to the audience, so a style which was in many ways much older.
Complaints about British people reviving vanished styles of music need to consider what native traditions had simply vanished by the 1950s, so that research and revival were the necessary ways towards a better musical situation. Obviously innovation was also possible.
I purchased a pack of DVDs with about 14 hours of “Music hall and Variety” on film. It was almost all Variety – music hall had closed down before sound cinema came on the scene, so the film records of it show old performers or are re-creations. It was nostalgia even in 1935. The “Variety” is just terrible, no wonder it disappeared as the 1960s arrived.
Supposedly Ian Whitcomb recorded “Plughole” on his 1966 album “Ian Whitcomb's Mod, Mod Music Hall!”

MacDonald counts 187 Beatles recordings of which three or four have some music hall roots. The number which connects to “show tunes” is much larger. They recorded “Besame mucho”, however much we want to forget that it ever happened.
If you look at the wider realm of words in verse, poetry is just part of the realm of song. The exit of the music is the formative separation or exclusion. So recalling the history of English song is likely to recover part of the history of English poetry. I feel this but I can't be specific about it. Almost all the poetry which works has reacted powerfully to the loss of music, making up for it, and so no longer resembles song lyrics still embedded in music. Poems which follow song conventions seem ludicrous on the page, they are a clearly identified sub-world.

Beautiful Feelings - more, or hardcore strinxotica

am at the stage of supporting the publisher in getting permission for quotes – he does the work, luckily for me. He prepared a list of quoted poems which has 116 rows. Ouch! The logistics of this are just impossible. How did I come to be so extravagant.
I have checked all the quotes and found a whole row of small changes. The only really key thing is a word missing from a Nat Raha poem. I did check all the quotes, before, but I think there were lots of changes so I should have checked them all again.
We have worked out which quotes are long enough for us to need to seek permission, according to the guidelines. Far too many. I am at the point today of working out which authors are likely to be off the radar, so that I can cut down the quoted text and get us out out of my commitment. I don’t want to spend six months trying to track people down who are impossible to find and whose one-time publishers can't find them. There is a point here, which is that a quote is supposed to demonstrate something. If that is so, you can explain the same point in prose. If you don’t know what it is demonstrating, you haven't written the book. You need to think it through properly. I suppose the other point is that the poems belong to the poet, not you. If you make an intellectual point, the point belongs to you and you don’t have the problems attendant on using what belongs to someone else.

Exhausting as the proofing of quotes was, it did raise a couple of sparks. For example, Stephanie Sy-Quia and Melanie Challenger both quote the same word from Beowulf: mearc-stapas. Yes, we were all diligent students and we had to read magnificently ornate 7th C poems in the original. But it’s also noticeable that the word amnion appears in both poets: “took inside the forget me not blue/ of its mouth my whole arm/like baby-Moses returned to the amnion.” (Challenger)
Also, I had to re-read Cloud to find the quotes I had used. Since I first read it, I have read a lot about the Mayan text Popol Vuh. I started that because I knew Thom had used it in ‘Cloud’. So this time I realised how many themes Thom had drawn from this 16th C text (which is essentially pre-Columbian). If I were going to start again, I could give a much better account of this.

Exotica. Wayne Burrows wrote "the Exotica Suite", in prose but like poetry. now better data: "Stereophonic sound came to at least a select few living rooms of the mid-1950s. Stereo recording became widespread in the music business by the 3rd quarter of 1957"

- so exotica is linked to the 33 1/3 LP and not to stereo as such as I suggested. Stereo vinyl was not around until 1958 whereas Exotica had been big since 1952. I should have said that the arrival of the long-playing record and better audio quality made it possible. Of course stereo contributed to the popularity of music with so many unusual textures (and so little melodic impulse) after 1958. But many Exotica LPs had not originally been recorded and pressed in stereo. Audiophiles were listening to music on audio tape, in stereo, in 1954.
"Exotica is a musical genre, named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same name that was popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s with Americans who came of age during World War II. The term was coined by Simon "Si" Waronker, Liberty Records co-founder and board chairman." - but that Les Baxter theremin album is in 1947?

Two quotes about Exotica: "The musical colloquialism exotica means tropical ersatz, the non-native, pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Amazon basin, the Andes, the Caribbean and tribal Africa. Denny described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las" dreamt of by armchair safari-ers."
"Ritual is the seminal exotica record, influencing all that came after it." (ritual of the savage, 1952 10" album (or 1951) by Les Baxter.) The sleeve also says "le sacre du sauvage" and the reference back to "le sacre du printemps" is obvious. I sank into a fan website which told me "Further exotification took place at later points thanks to the usual suspects Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, but here this original lacks the paradisiac notion… while thankfully exuding and even eclipsing the middle class wanderlust of the 50‘s." and "Playful yet unexpectedly dark due to the ham-fisted dulcimer/harpsichord nucleus coated in maraca blots, this composition seamlessly connects to Busy Port in that the exotic is getting normalized and the faux-baroque West getting augmented by the unknown." (courtesy of ambientexotica.com) "The woodwinds and soft marimbas provide the teal-colored silkened jungle backdrop to the whirling flutes and iridescent drums." Damn! if only I could write like that! I believe the author is Bligh Kon-Tiki.
and on a more stringent site "Either way, the development of this gloriously camp and morally dubious genre offers a window into one of the strangest moments in American pop-cultural history."

Anyway, this is the unreal atmosphere which Burrows was trying to evoke. stringent exotica?
Writing about Sam Riviere, I quoted '“suffer from paralysing yet hyperactive mode of boredom” leading to “its central theme is billed as the economic downturn that has negatively affected so many, but your existence, funded as it is at the taxpayer’s expense, remains almost completely unaffected.” He describes the process in a flow chart.' I have been trying to remember where I got this from. Actually it was that anthology edited by George Szirtes and Helen Ivory, In their own words. I didn’t mention this in the bibliography because I felt that the bibliog was expanding and squeezing out the text. Riviere also says about 81 Austerities “if the success of the marketing methods you sought to parody compromises the value of the project as a cultural critique”. So this is a level of deep-pile ironies which I didn’t record. I have a feeling that collective memory will write down 81 Austerities as a documentary indictment of David Cameron’s austerity measures when the poet has explicitly said that it is nothing like that. “81” began life as a ‘tumblr blog’ where other people could leave comments (I think the comments at the back of the book are selected from those interjections?). I suspect that making a book out of an already successful blog is a "parody" of a "marketing strategy" used by numerous wannabe writers, where they establish via a web release that there is a market and then go to a publisher saying “look, I have done the market research for you”. (I am watching on amazon prime a Canadian TV series called ‘Sanctuary’ where the creator made non-professional film stories and used those to get a network TV corporation to invest.)
Riviere indicates that he had a pre-existing state of anxiety which inhibited him from writing poems, and which related to feelings of guilt about being funded while other people his age were being reduced to (economically) the civil dead, and that he released the anxiety by relating each poem to the occasion which made it speak, and the occasions involved Riviere being at least modestly affluent. Affluent but anxious. (I don’t set all this out in what I write.)

The book refers to 972 poets featuring in the Poetry Book Society suggestion lists over a five-year period. I did another spreadsheet of the quarters posted since I made that original list, and found another 460 names, so the new total is 1430. Interesting that the average over seven years is an additional 200 a year. I am not able to take in 200 new names in a year. That is one every two days, isn’t it. Of course most of the titles on their website have a write-up of some kind, you can compare my book to those and of course my claim is that my critical view is more valuable than the uncritical laudatory texts supplied by the publisher. Those might reflect the views of the poets about their own work, of course, which the publisher is likely to know about. Rupi Kaur’s website offers boxes of cards with the inscription “writing prompts self-esteem”, and this might explain why poets might not agree with my views and might not give me permission to quote.

The interesting thing about In their own words is that, while it was published by Salt and Salt had about 200 British poets, it only includes three Salt poets. So you could definitely write a book about the Salt poetry list, but this totally isn't it. It has 60 poets. Again, we conclude from the lack of overlap that the catchment area contains hundreds of names. So writing about it is a bold enterprise.

Counting poets (again)

I was minded to work out how many poets were being published in the current century, up to 2020. I had counts for three years, based on library catalogues, and they averaged 1436 titles. That would yield 28,720 titles if you scale it up. I then looked at 157 names and did a count of how many books they had published in the period 2000-2020. The average was 4.49. Combining the two figures gives you a result of 6382 poets getting published during the period.

We can add a nuance by considering people leaving the scene, for whatever reasons. If you assume that someone has a 40-year creative career, that implies that 2.5% of the cohort leave the lists each year. You can assume, again, that 2.5% arrive each year. So the total active in any year would be roughly 4255.

We are also interested in how many poets are failing to get published. If we take a guess that this is the same number as the luckier ones who do get published, that would be 4255 again. So 4255 right now with a book ready that they can't place. I think we should imagine a higher turnover for them: say, that they stay in that waiting-hall for ten years before either achieving success or leaving the game.

I am interested in Norman Jope’s figures (in a series of posts, now running, for The Argotist’s blog). He estimates 0.1% of the adult population, so 50,000 people, actively writing publishable poetry. This involves a count of poets active in Plymouth, a scene he knows well, and scaling up to everywhere else. So the 50,000 notional poets are a projection from 250 actually counted. (I don’t think he actually counted them: it is an estimate of what is happening in obscure writing groups around the city.)

If we look away from the figures, we remember that they are just a way of approaching the history of feelings. Feelings of frustration and attraction have peaks and troughs, they follow a curve of which time is one important dimension. Further, time fulfils feelings; people resolve frustration, move into a poetic community, accept other people, over time. So trying to add time data is important. There is a collective energy, and it has visible fluctuations; the poetic emotion around the country is stronger at certain times and inspires more people. It is presumably communicated, people emit energy because they soak up energy being emitted around them. So the figures may capture those intense fluctuations, objective counts capturing subjective energies. If we are lucky.

I can see that I have no way of counting the poets who are writing eagerly but not finding a publisher. I don’t really know if it is 4,000 or 14,000. Presumably editors in the magazine world can see what is happening, although a plunge into their overflowing email boxes could not readily give us a count. Butcher’s Dog magazine report 3179 submissions for one issue, in April 2024. I don't know how you map that onto the whole field. I have never heard of this magazine. I am not clear if this is 3179 poets or 3179 poems, the way they write is ambiguous. A press release uttered by Broken Sleep head honcho Aaron Kent says “I've finished reading all 850+ submissions received for the Broken Sleep Books pamphlet window.“ (Their website currently says they have two poetry windows a year, one for ‘pamphlets’ and one for ‘collections’.) So that might be a count of poets who haven't got outlets and are knocking at the door. But is that all the frustrated poets, or 10% of them, or 1%? And, are these unpublished scripts from the last two years, roughly, or the last twenty years? when does a homeless script finally disappear?
I mentioned frustration but maybe we can also think of writing poetry as like karaoke, people capture something hugely enthusiastic for themselves, the fabulous thing is decentralised and it completes itself by doing that. Art isn’t supposed to be private property. This is where the collective thing becomes interesting. If there are 1648 books being published in a year, maybe you are part of something exciting and the fate of your own poems doesn’t matter. If you don't feel part of it... you aren't part of it. OK, that is a much bigger problem than the reactions of one editor. Why aren't you part of it? I am just saying that we shouldn't think of under-published poets as miserable.

I don’t think these are very good figures and I hope they can act as a start to a process which would give us a more robust set. As I said, the real interest is a history of feelings. And of collective identities. We can get to a good model by detailing and critiquing weak models.

The catalogue search turned up some bizarre facts. One guy had published 22 titles over a few years, apparently self-published. I have never heard of him. There is a Christian publisher in Shrewsbury, Feather, publishing very conservative verse for a specialised market. One poet had published multiple titles with Feather and with Writers Forum, the low-quality avant garde publisher, printing by photocopier. So one person straddles both? unbelievable. She had racked up 45 titles but that might be an under-count. The British Library catalogue often doesn't say if a title is poetry or prose, and you can't open up the detailed level because their service is at half-mast in the aftermath of a massive cyber attack. So, I saw 89 titles by her and I figured 45 of them might be poetry. So the figures might shift by 2 or 3% on a recount. And the total has gone down to 1644.

Wet thatch and Gaelic women poets

Wet thatch and Gaelic women poets

I am reading a book called ‘B’ait leo bean’, by Mairin nic Eoin (1998), so it is “aspects of gender ideology in the [Irish] Gaelic literary tradition”, but in Irish. (Gender is “inscne”.) This is not my field of knowledge, I am finding the Irish very difficult but it is also a good learning experience, so I want to persist. You don't find much writing which explores social divisions in the Gaelic world, as opposed to a kind of conservative blurred memory in which there were no conflicts and everyone could afford to pay their rent.
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill wrote that essay (1994) where she remembers being told often as a child “Three things you don’t want in a village: wet thatchers, close sowing, and a female poet”. The wet thatch is one put up badly so that it leaks, the wheat seeds have to be several inches apart or they will stifle each other and you won’t get any grain. As for the female poet, what problems could she cause? That was interesting but I have not been able to find any trace of this proverb anywhere else. I think the problem with female poets was that they had the ability to curse people and this left a bad memory. It is my guess that this anxiety stems from the ban-fhili’s power of curing (or admonishing and commanding?) and that the role of Gaelic poets was not simply to create poems to entertain and to please. I think this partly because of the Scottish analogies. But actually male poets could curse people (and humiliate them) so the issue isn’t cursing, in fact, but the fact that male poets had very strong alliances with the church and with (male) heads of land-owning families and this gave them status.
I forgot to record that this "cursing by proverb" didn't stop ni Dhomhnaill.

I saw a story somewhere about female poets in Scotland being buried face down so they couldn't come back to life; a quick Google search turns up this version of it: “Even as late as the end of the 17th and early 18th C, tradition records that at least two female Gaelic poetesses, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn, (of Mull) and Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, (associated mainly with the MacLeods) when they died were said to have been buried face down due to having composed in metres that were the prerogative of the male poets.” (The source proposed is O’Baoill C, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn Song–maker of Mull, (2009, 20). I think the paraphrase has added the idea that it was using the wrong metres which brought the danger, I think this is a 21st century interpolation. I doubt O'Baoill said that.) Surely it was the ability to curse people which people were afraid of.
The website of Historic Environment Scotland has this about Mairi nic Leoid (circa 1615- circa 1707): “NicLeòid began composing while working as a nurse for the MacLeod Chief of Dunvegan in Skye but she was exiled to the Isle of Scarba because of her art. It is believed that the Chief banished her when she wrote a song that praised one of his relatives too highly. She was eventually allowed to return but on the condition that she stop writing songs."
The surname includes daughter of and is a female version of the name “Macleod”. Further: “NicLeòid is buried in St Clements church in Rodel, Harris, the village where she was born. She is thought to have been buried face down in the south transept of the church.”
(It is of interest that nic corresponds to nighean and in Irish is just ní, or Nic in front of vowels. The reconstructed Old Gaelic form is inigena, which is attested in an Ogham inscription and looks a lot more like Continental Celtic relations.) The form “nic Leoid” is standardised, but she was evidently referred to in daily speech as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh”. Carmichael Watson's edition of her songs (the first ever to be printed) gives three versions from folklore of why she was exiled and adds a fourth which is his own speculation. The folklore is rich and we should doubt that she was literally buried face down: I guess that this was a standard tale about female poets and that as she was a female poet who had many stories told about her this one got attached along with the rest. However, we don’t know of any tales of male poets being buried face down!
Watson says “a third [version[] is that of Miss Tolmie, who suggested that it was due to fear that her over-praise of the young children of the house would bring ill-luck upon them.” He records “She directed that she should be placed face downward in the grave—" beul nam breug a chur foidhpe "; her burial-place is still known in the south transept of Tùr Chliamain, St. Clement's church in Rodel.” The phrase means “the mouth of the lies [to be] put underneath”, which could refer to flattery and over-praise. Again, the story is memorable but may not actually be true. (Variant “[Gus] beul na brèige a chumail dùinte”.)

Anne Frater did a doctorate on (Scottish) Gaelic women poets, and her essay on Mairi Nic Leoid is on-line. “Both Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and her fellow poetess Mairearad nighean Lachlainn from Mull are said to be buried in a manner, which, in Norse times, was reserved for those believed to have been witches. Why they should have been treated in this way, when the only traditions that have come down to us about them concern their songmaking, is a mystery. Perhaps they were considered to have infringed on the domain of the bards, especially by daring, as women, to compose panegyric verse.” The story must be confined to those two poets, or Frater would have mentioned other instances of it.

In Nic Eoin’s excellent book we find matter on cursing or at least mocking. The role of cainteoir, apparently always female, is described in the Irish law codes always in negative terms. It is a role which the law does not institute or approve – we are likely to think that has a reality external to the law. Of course the idea of connecting a role in 8th C society with a proverb heard, reprovingly, in the 1940s, is rife with problems. The problem I have is that Nic Eoin records a marginal, even accursed, place being given to women poets (of the cainteor type) in the Irish law codes and this seems to connect to the “buried upside down” ruling. But the codes belong to the 8th C AD, in the text we have, and are probably older. It is very problematic to see an attitude, and correlated artistic activity, continuing for such a stretch of time. I badly need more evidence. It is fairly clear that cainteor, “woman satirist”, although literally identical with the word cainteoir “chatterbox”, is functionally a different word. It presumably comes from the “can” root, meaning “speak”. “Satirist” is a standard translation but pretty misleading, functions like cursing, humiliating, the evil eye, tell you more about the reputation of these women. (There is also a form ban-chainte.) It is frustrating that we don’t have any record of the verse they composed (or at any rate Nic Eoin does not mention it). Moreover, they were just one of a group of defined classes of poet who were disapproved of by the law.

A cainteoir deployed specialised language to fulfil functions other than that of creating beautiful verse for entertainment. If we had their verse in written form it might be hard for us to consume or even to interpret. I am also guessing that, however prominent their function of cursing, admonishing, or prohibition, this was just part of their range and might be only a consequence of a social status and associated power which they enjoyed. Verse form may have been a way of clothing significant speech– we are more interested in what that significance was than in the verbal form.
The role of priests is often to admonish, to prohibit, to condemn, and even to satirise. Surely the medieval sermon absorbed all the contents of satire as it was known in Classical times. Admonishing is just an aspect of social power. The cainteoir may have a pre-Christian origin and may have had access to supernatural forces in some form (associated with asarlaíocht, sorcery). We might think about translating the word as witch rather than satirist. A cainteoir might also have strong knowledge, eloquence, and even supernatural power – not just glittering malice.

I was expecting to find a discussion of the ‘wet thatch’ proverb cited by Ni Dhomhnaill in Nic Eoin’s book, but it is not mentioned at all. Certainly Nic Eoin is describing the ideology of gender in Gaelic literature, not in society as a whole. She does list a group of anti-female proverbs from Irish collections. I have been unable to find a context for the ‘wet thatch’ proverb.

John MacInnes (quoted by Frater) has another explanation which is bizarre and does not seem to fit well with 17th C conditions. He recalls that both poets mentioned are said to have had a female companion who accompanied them, and devised (wordless) choruses for the songs and set them to tunes. MacInnes suggests that this other women was a double, or fetch, and that they engaged in trances where the double was sent out to sea or elsewhere while the real person was unconscious, entranced. This may be part of the “face down” story without actually being true of the historical people to whom the stories got attached. (It also belongs with an RL Stevenson story called “Thrawn Janet”, which you will remember, I expect.) I like the idea that the double did not have articulate speech and so only composed the refrains, “ho ro hug o” and so on.
Nic Eoin does not quote any verse composed by (or, possibly composed by) a cainteoir. This is disappointing but it may confront us with necessary thoughts about the limited nature of the written record. This was certainly associated, very often, with monasteries, the church, and with the courts of lords and petty kings. Those were strongly male environments. We have seen that the law-codes represented a point of view which was different from what society as a whole thought, and which reproved certain professions which were apparently quite thriving. We have excellent evidence for bards passing tests, writing poetry of incredible technical difficulty and being patronised by kings and nobles. That is not to say that people who did not receive that formal training did not compose poetry – for other social purposes and in simpler, “folk”, verbal form. The point may have been that they did not compose panegyric, but other genres of poetry. The function of praise is symmetrical to the function of scolding or satire. In fact they are part of a single function, of assigning status and merit, and there is a single scale on which individuals are rated as good and bad. It is hard to imagine a person who could do honour but who could not dishonour. The symmetry breaks down when the scolding part includes cursing and laying spells on people. Obviously there is more money in writing praise poems; praise poets could become part of princely courts and their poems were able to be transcribed and collected and preserved by the families of the princes and lords. The scolding poems didn’t have the same propaganda value or the same chance of surviving in a recopied manuscript until modern times. Maybe the manuscript record, vast as it is, has specific points of view, as do the law codes and the Church.

There is a very interesting folk-tale about the Cliar Sheanchain, discussed by John Shaw. This describes an era when the Cliar (Seanchan was a 7th century Irish poet but bands of wandering poets were called Seanchan's in memory of him, Sheanchain in the genitive) used to visit land-owners, benefiting from the Gaelic laws of hospitality, and ate him out of house and home. A large and hungry band of these individuals descended upon a certain MacDonald of Clanranald one day (perhaps in the 16th century?) and demanded a feast of beef every night. Expelling them would have breached a quite fundamental law of Highland behaviour. “In any case Clanranald sent out an invitation to every bard and rhymer and lampooner on his lands, and even those on the adjoining bounds who were counted to be exceedingly sharp tongued, but nevertheless their cutting speech was only as the blow of a hammer on cold iron compared to the Cliar Sheanchain. By then they had been in Nunton for nearly a year and Clanranald was fully weary of them; they had humiliated and disgraced him, eaten and drunk up his store, his reputation was in danger, his stock diminished in the fields.” A female poet of the laird’s household caught the Cliar at a sensitive moment and composed a devastating short poem which wrapped up numerous true facts about their visit and ridiculed them in the most merciless way. A law for poets was that if they were humiliated without having the ability to reply wittily they had to leave. So that is what they did and the last food reserves of the laird were spared. What strikes me is the cursing and humiliatory aspect of the female poet’s utterance. Someone with such powers could well be a candidate for a face-down burial. What is also interesting is that the story shows a cainteoir in a favourable light, so in the way in which they would have considered themselves. To be exact the victor in the story I have just quoted is not a female poet, but the editor remarks of a whole group of such tales “Here, and in a number of other versions, it is made explicit that the poets were defecating al fresco when approached. The appearance of a woman–usually a poetess–as verbal challenger in the scenario seems to be geographically widespread and thus unlikely to be a recent innovation. In a variant recorded in 1968 from the renowned Tiree reciter, Donald Sinclair (Domhnall Chaluim Bain), the company is confronted by a woman whom he identifies as An Aigeannach, the eighteenth-century poetess, Mary MacDonald from Mull,[.]” The paper is titled ‘what Alexander Carmichael did not print”, referring to the folklorist of that name. John Shaw cites two versions of this story in which the victor is Mairi nighean Alistair Ruaidh.
The Cliar were wandering poets and the word is similar to the Welsh clerwr, a minor poet, and clera, go on a poetic tour. The word is agreed to be from a Latin word, which would be cleric or clerk in English. Perhaps literate individuals were simply called clerks in early Gaelic society.

It is fair to mention that Shaw, after collecting so many Scottish Gaelic versions of this story about the expulsion of poet-vagrants, traces the whole story back to a written Irish story, of which the first record is circa 1638. I am interested in the temporal spread (so from a manuscript in 1638 to a recital in 1968) and the story is likely to be older than the oldest (surviving) written record.
A web page on Lilias Adie, d. 1704, of Fife, says “Her intertidal grave is the only known one in Scotland of an accused witch – most were burned.” She died before coming to trial. So it doesn't look as if there are physical examples of witches being buried face down. Actually we know that Adie was buried under a huge stone but not what her burial position was. To state the obvious, convicted witches were burnt and not buried at all.
I should clarify that Nic Eoin does mention sagas in which poems by women characters feature. They are referred to as banfhaidhe, “female poets” not cainteoir. Faidh is cognate with the word vates which appears in Latin poetry and is a high grade of poet. The sagas are set in a fictional time, of late paganism, so that St Patrick can appear as a character in some. We have poems by Feidhealm in The Tain and others in texts known as Immacallam in druad Brain ocus inna banfhaitho Febuil and Tochmarc Treblainne. The verse which Nic Eoin quotes is remarkably archaic, very stiff and ornate.

On collapsing and spreading horizontally

sixth blog on new book

I had a spreadsheet which listed 1700 poetry titles (by single authors) coming out in 2019. I have checked the spreadsheet line by line and the total has shrunk to 1648. Which is a less pleasing number. Anyway the point is that thousands of people want to be poets, lots of them are good poets, and this makes it difficult to attack the people in charge. However tired the managers are, the atmosphere of the scene is attractive and this is such a good thing that other features slide out of view.
I have just finished proofing ‘Beautiful feelings of sensitive people’, my new book about 21st century poetry, and my feeling about it is that it is not attacking the way things happen. That sort of radical cultural criticism doesn't suit the current climate. The function of welcoming people into poetry, making them feel they have status in a real community, making them feel that they can say what they want to say, is more important. The idea that there is some much better way of doing things which is readily available and familiar to people enough that they could move into it without vast effort does not seem to hold true. The modernist thing is available, but after 50 years (or do we mean 100?) it is clearly a minority position rather than the future. Exposing people for not being properly modernist does not seem to be a convincing verbal manoeuvre. It has instead become clear that what people were really excited about, and hoping for, in the Sixties was derepression. This is quite different from modernism. And we now have it. It may look like chaos but the principle of derepression is actually a sort of module of design which has been applied everywhere to build the landscape we actually see.
It is difficult to see how you can count 1650 titles coming out in one year and also complain that the scene is restrictive, conservative, repressive, elitist, etc. So if you abandon that line of argument you end up with something else. Quite possibly the ‘gatekeepers’ are tired and don’t want to defend standards, and the quality control is poor. Yes, but that is in keeping with the collective wish for derepression, and there are positive results which we can all appreciate.
That total is roughly twice the figure for titles coming out in the 1980s. The landscape was mature then, not underdeveloped, so this kind of growth is genuinely impressive. It does not argue for persistent blunders by the people with influence. The growth rate is probably understated by doing a count, because of the proliferation of Internet activity which does not use paper at all, and which would represent a much more rapid growth rate. I can't measure it but surely a lot of poets are bypassing the paper world. The count of titles does express the relationship of poetry to its budget controllers and its audience, so the economic basis. There is a relationship between the Basis and the ideology of the participants, but also it is hard to repress anything. That function is vacant.
I have just seen a post by Norman Jope where he says: "Overall, if we were to estimate that as many as 0.1% of the adult population might be writing poetry to a publishable standard – which wouldn’t be that far off the mark in Plymouth, given the extent of participation in local groups – and each of them produced, say, two poems a month (which has basically been the measure of my output since I can remember), then that would mean that, across the UK, there would be approximately 50,000 poets producing approximately 1.2 million publishable poems annually. I accept that this is a demented exercise, but it’s also an honest attempt to quantify the sheer amount of poetry that is out there now."
The extrapolation is unsecured, he didn't actually count all the poets in Plymouth, and the category of "publishable" is shaky, but this is a valuable contribution. The level of books being published is vitally connected to the pressure of poets swarming up the beaches, and it could cause serious problems if the level of frustration rose any higher. It's very helpful to look at the pattern from the other direction and try to pick up how if 1700 books come out then that might still leave thousands of poets barred from entry.
I suppose 1650 books in a year might mean 100,000 poems. So maybe 90% of "effective" poems don't get printed in a volume? But if you add in anthologies, the percentage shifts again. And if you add magazines. I look forward to the other six parts of this promised series of seven posts.

I am reading Tim Shipman’s book on the Tory problems at the June 2017 general election. It was published in 2017 so it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. Shipman says (p.448) that “Labour won among voters with a degree by seventeen points, while the Tories won by a 22 per cent margin with those who left school at sixteen.” This is stunning, I had never seen this analysis before. Clearly Labour's later defeat at the 2019 election (sliding down to 202 seats) was because they were struggling with the working-class vote. It is quite reasonable to think that the educated are behaving like a separate country.
The proposal is that education will make you more liberal, open your head to new possibilities, make you acceptable to a more diverse range of people, make new pleasures available to you, make you more tolerant and more perceptive. If you head in this direction you will get somewhere (and not just run out of space). That is the offer. Crudely, there is a Commodity, and poetry too offers this commodity. It is offering all the things I have just listed. They are part of the poetry Brand and we will be in trouble if poetry fails to deliver this commodity, or if something else offers more of it.
At the same time I think this group may be marching away from where the country is and I want Labour to be the party of the working class.

This puts anything I write about recent poetry into perspective. It makes the details invisible, I suppose. It means the differences between different parts of the poetic landscape are less important than a shared, if unconscious, sense of direction. Again, I think poetry is delivering what it has to deliver, and I wouldn't feel right attacking the scene for not moving in some different direction. It opens people up to a range of possibilities and that is a perfectly valid endeavour. So I can move back down to the detailed level and talk about individual books or poems. Of those books from 2019, dozens are interesting and start up lines of investigation and pleasure.

We have to ask “what does going to university” mean. I would rather leave this as a mystery than write it up as a supposedly known value. Students took over poetry in the 1960s. Other groups lost control, lost their stakes. In order to record the history of poetry you would also need to know the history of the student body and of university life. Of course that is a more complex question than just reading books full of poems.

If you accept that the artistically successful poetry is not confined to one stylistic area, but scattered over a large landscape, it follows that the audience is also divided and has different reactions to the same poem. Derepression means pursuing personal wishes, and being taught by them over time, and not accepting a social norm as the goal of artistic experience. This makes it difficult to write criticism, which after all presents one reaction pattern as a norm, or as success. So it is difficult to write down a consensus view. And pretty easy to annoy people.

I read a 1957 book called ‘Declaration’. It is statements about the state of culture by various English intellectuals, or supposed intellectuals. I went for a walk and paused in the pub in Mansfield Road and they had a bookshelf and ‘Declaration’ was one of the books. Lindsay Anderson's essay in it was striking because he was sure that he knew how people had to behave in order to be happy, he knew what films had to say, he knew the right way to make films, and he could relate the failure of English films to behave properly back to the financial structure of the industry and the interests of the company Board. He was absolutely granite in his certainty. It was impressive and you could also see why he was unemployed in the film industry. All that certainty is what derepression swept away. I can’t correlate one style with moral virtue and political progress. And the plurality of styles also implies a scattering of taste, which is why I can’t write criticism that a lot of people will not disagree with. I don’t even agree with Anderson, the kind of film he presses for is not my favourite sort of film. I can see that every time he saw a British film he rewrote the script to make it a much better film. This was his daily activity. But I also feel that he rewrote every person he encountered to be something else, not themselves, a projection of Anderson. That idea that the film can only be Good by symbolically destroying the people who had financed it, and then redirected the script towards cliche, deference, and sentimentality (etc.), tends to produce bad films. Just in a different way. He was a critic writing, covertly, about the films he wasn't allowed to make.
If you grasp Anderson's sense of conviction, and moral authority, you grasp what "going to university" was supposed to do for you and also why educated people turned against that sense of authority and favoured something more diffuse and humanistic.
I am inclined to add Elizabeth David as a Fifties cultural voice imbued with certainty and authority. To be accurate, her comments on English cookery are just remarks made in passing but she makes it very clear that English cookery is hopeless and probably fatal. Her books were aimed at English cooks, almost by definition, so they were the subjects of attack as well as the recipients. I think this kind of thing can be addictive, so that people wanted cultural critics to be destructive and rigidly certain, they wanted to be told how culture had to be. But derepression released a hundred styles outside the central and worn-out style; derepression may have been a response to the convincing critique of hostile commentators, but it also made that critique obsolete. I suppose I miss it. Anyway I am not denouncing modern British poetry and I think it is too scattered to have a single point of failure. To denounce something, you have to have a cogent description of it first.
Anderson was strongly on the Left and David was, if anything, firmly on the Right and committed to an upper-middle-class lifestyle which was always surrounded by something unacceptable, lapsed, and ‘uncivilised’. But the sound they give off seems to be much the same sound.

Oh well. I certainly liked going for a walk, good for my blood pressure, and I certainly liked finding a book I didn’t know was there and being plunged back into the state of 1956. Maybe ‘Beautiful feelings’ will record some of the state of 2024.