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at the family home of a former lover's. The re-gendering of Bambi was deliberate (something I play with in another unpublished work).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?