a shop window on recent poetry

I indulged myself and copied down a 5-year series of titles from the fabulous PBS web page. I gathered 1150 titles. This is certainly a luxury experience, things being offered for your pleasure in senseless profusion. It is more than anyone can take in and so it is like marrying a millionaire. The luxury aspect is also that I am not obliged to buy any of them – I am free of responsibility and that is a wonderful feeling. Do they actually read all the books or do they let publishers put up all the books they choose to? what is this a window on?
Retailing is actually the selective principle – we are not seeing a sensibility, even a repressive and partial one. A package of pamphlets has just arrived - the address label has the publisher's name in one corner- so the PBS don't keep a stock of thousands of books, instead when you order through their website they pass the order on to the publisher for fulfilment. So "a shop with no stock" and no losses.
I checked and out of 74 names in the classic 2014 anthology Dear World 52 do not appear in this PBS series. Why do this check? Because poets have a fear of being left out it; is like children being afraid of the dark. So as we gaze in fascination at the 1150 titles displayed on the PBS pages, we have to ask whether we are leaving space for the ones who are being left out. And, obviously, those 52 names from Dear World can only be a visible marker for a much larger group of poets we are not seeing. The qualifier for the PBS list may be simply that the publisher is willing to pay the PBS fee (or, accept the share they take as virtual retailer). So perhaps we are seeing 1150 titles out of 1800 that actually mattered. Gulp.
The jacket of the 2011 anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets announces that these are the “poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come”. Evidently that hasn’t proved to be so – the number of poets on the market is just too large. The fifty poets in that volume, incredibly gifted as a collective entity, are only a fraction of the poets achieving success in the world of 2022. To extend that thought – nothing dominates the poetry world, there is no “generational sound” and it is difficult for anyone to claim that some style, or some individual, is the Sound of Now.
I do have a feeling about the scene and it is roughly that the problems which wrecked most English poets a few years ago, the absurd fantasies and inhibitions, have been resolved and that there is a whole world of poets who have just walked out of that conservative and repressed situation. At one level, that abolishes my stock in trade – the critique which we, collectively, voiced in the 1990s does not need to be voiced any more, because everyone has realised it is true and has moved on.

This looks like an invitation to shut up.I am going to review three or four books a year even if the total of significant books is 240. "Mission accomplished- but the beat goes on."

The next corollary is that the Alternative scene which I and we saw as the exit from a depressed mainstream did not win as the mainstream lost. We thought there was only one opposition, unified as a conscious anti-principle, but there were a hundred ways out of the post-Movement shipwreck. I suppose in retrospect that the good thing for cultural critics, in the Eighties or Nineties, was moments of realising that the orthodox route of an avant garde exit was surrounded by dozens of other routes, less travelled and certainly less theorised. The scene was in fact not going to experience a re-run of the modernist revolution of the 1920s or of the flourishing of the American avant garde in the 1950s. These views gave an overall framework which apparently explained everything but which was in some ways impervious to the impact of new facts. In electoral politics, it was obviously the Labour Party which replaced the Conservatives in government, and which aggregated very disparate forces of opposition; this pattern could not be simplistically transferred to the sphere of cultural politics. (At this point it is not Labour which is the “natural” force of opposition in every region, so for example Scotland and some parts of Wales have a different “natural” centre-left choice. Back in the Nineties, I was enthusiastic about books like Sharawaggi, or by Frank Kuppner (A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty) or John Hartley Williams, which did not fit into the preset values of the Official Alternative, and as an editor I was frustrated by those preset values.
I think the old Mainstream lost power because it had an inherently weak position, based on the weak poetry it produced, and because there were many other arts which showed poets what art could do. It wasn’t humiliated on the field of combat by an Alternative which was barely visible in the retail outlets and libraries. To pursue that, I don't think the Alternative was defeated in quite the same way, but I am unclear what its status now is, for example whether it still has coherence as a theoretical identity. I don’t know what its critique of the poetry being written today is. You can set up as a rule that “all rebel poetry is the legacy of other rebel poetry” and so that “unconventional poetry published in 2022 reflects the glory of the heroes of 1972 who actually invented it”. But, is it really true that the “repressed” reproduces itself? or is it rather true that Official poetry is so bloody boring that it has generated 1 new rebel every day since 1960? The old Alternative was rather boastful about Legacy, to the point where it became an obvious dogma and mainly revealed insecurity and even a sense of defeat. I was reading Sophie Robinson’s “Rabbit” last night… a contemporary classic, I think, something obviously strong and captivating and subjective. It is not something that the Mainstream could take on. But is it indebted to the British Alternative? I very much doubt this. It is indebted to Frank O’Hara, in a minor way (65 years have passed!). Robinson mentions Tracy Emin at one point.
One of the vital moments in that 1962 Allott anthology is where he will only print Geoffrey Hill’s poems if Hill provides an explanation of what they mean. So Hill is forced to come clean and write a commentary. When Hill says “I may have been thinking of John Foster Dulles’ view of God as head of Strategic Air Command”, that is astonishing. My point… yes, there is one… is that culture was run (in 1962) by Cold War Christian Conservatives, and there was a whole poetry world made in their image. Hill was being sarcastic about it. That system was against creativity and it was bound to shipwreck. Even if it was still in power in the 1980s. We are seeing 100 varieties of poetry now because poetry is going to be like that as soon as the central models are unplugged. And it isn’t a re-run of anything. There is no overall framework.
To talk about fairness, we would have to consider, not just the 1150 titles in the shop window, but as many again which were published but didn't get into the shop window. So, 2300 titles. It is apparent that nobody in the scene, so nobody in management, read all those 2300 titles. But, fairness would involve exact knowledge of all the poets and their merits. So the system floats on a layer of unfairness, underneath everything. But, if some irritated poet says “you are guilty of not reading my book”, what am I guilty of? The discourse around poetry involves guilt tripping, all the time. Everyone has a grievance. It looks as if the more books come out the more unfair things are. This is ridiculous! The temperament of the scene is irrational abundance based on floating unfairness. The “management”, for what it’s worth, has produced a set-up in which a flood of titles is coming out, in which thousands of poets are having their wish come true in the sense that their book gets published. I think it is hard to attack this outcome.
More work has extracted the fact that the 1150 titles come from 970 different poets. Groan. Who are all these people?