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 poets, the way they write is ambiguous.
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 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 critiquing weak models.
The 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 might be poetry. So the figures might shift by 2 or 3% on a recount.
Sunday 28 April 2024
Wednesday 17 April 2024
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.
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.
Wednesday 3 April 2024
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 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 (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 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.
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 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 (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 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.
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