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.