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
Friday, 30 August 2024
Tuesday, 27 August 2024
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.
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.
Thursday, 15 August 2024
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.’
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.’
Saturday, 10 August 2024
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?
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?
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