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.

Sheenagh Pugh

Sheenagh Pugh (1950-)

I really can’t remember reading her selected poems, I think I liked them but didn’t find them outstanding. I have lost my notes. Upsetting. I am following up things I missed, and I have been reading some pretty weak poetry… have to say I enjoyed reading Pugh as a rest from that. It seemed worth getting the books again (both the Selected Poems, 1990 and 2009, this time) and investigating just to keep the record complete. The information I found was that she had a pamphlet out in 1977, Crowded by Shadows, and followed this up with a full book, What a Place to Grow Flowers, in 1979. Another dozen books have followed. The Anglo-Welsh thing is not a source of ideas in her work – she grew up in Birmingham and, although she has generally published with Welsh firms, she has ignored the Anglo-Welsh conventions.

A lot of the poems are in rhyme, which also implies (mostly) regular line lengths. I looked at rhyming poems in the 70s and 80s, it seemed to be an issue. Also it lends itself to counting, which could give you a indicator for change over time. A lot of them were assonating. I didn’t know if this was subtle and effective, or a compromise. Pugh seems to like off-rhymes.

Involve him wholly, and no other partner.
Circled in his arms, he acts out the caress
of the words; lets his hands wander on his shoulder,
under his shirt… step by step he betrays

all the trade secrets; make the audience watch
the truth about all those who love in rhyme.
There never is a partner you can touch;
whoever writes the words, they are for him.

I can't qualify this accurately. I am not sure the rhymes make any difference to the artistic impact. Then, they are weak: watch/touch doesn't really ring, neither does rhyme/ him. They are very unemphatic as a decoration. The rhymes are consistently weak, so this must be a conscious preference. After a while, full rhymes would clash with the verse. I think the pattern of near-rhymes must reassure the poet that the work is finished and organised. So the match betrays/caress is significant. It doesn't seem like a rhyme at all, but the context of many similar harmonies means that it must be counting as one. To sum up, s matches with a z sound (the voiced equivalent of s), and an ei diphthong rhymes with an e, the first component of the diphthong. There is no text-book that says this is a rhyme. There was a rapid decline of rhyme in the Sixties, so the use of rhyme was tied up with political (or theological?) disputes about the status of the new Sixties culture. People were fed up of rhyme at that point (notoriously, the same people who were irritated by rhyming poems enjoyed pop songs with rhyming lyrics). This is not necessarily a way of getting to the heart of a poet, or any poet. There was a revival of rhyme in the years around 1980 – as a way of restoring the past or maybe of fending off criticisms about jettisoning the artistic past. A lot of those restorative rhymed poems weren’t very good. The formalism wasn’t very expressive. With Pugh the method seems self-effacing… the lines are neat and the rhymes are easy to miss.

Because I have read the Faber Poetry Introduction volumes, I can see that there is a resemblance between Pugh writing a novel in a poem and some of the things in the 70s issues of those anthologies, where Andrew Motion’s “incomplete narratives” may have been the initial examples. (They are in volume 3.) David Harsent also wrote poems which which seemed to summarise novels. There is a sort of echo of George Mackay Brown in some of Pugh's poems (Brown was also taking sagas, a kind of early novel, and detaching events from them to make poems). This is the harvest from reading lots of 70s poetry, but the traces of these models in Pugh's poems are pretty thin, she is an original poet and her poems are highly finished. A poem I liked particularly was ‘Stonelight’:

Each stone happens
in its own way. One stands
true in a house-wall.

Anger quickens another : it flies,
fills a mouth with blood.

Shaped and polished, one shines
in the eyes of many.

One seems inert, earth-embedded;
underneath, colonies are teeming.

But the best are seal-smooth,
and the hand that chose them

sent them skimming, once, twice,
ten times over the ocean, to the edge
of sight, and whenever they bruise the water’s skin,
an instant is bruised

into brightness. The eye flinches. When they sink,
if they sink, the light they left

wells out, spills, seeds itself, prickling
like stars, on a field that never takes
the same shape twice.

This is all about objects, which may be a distraction for a poet so interested in people. Actually it refers indirectly to people, raising walls, throwing stones at each other, and so on. I like it partly because it is about stones flying and giving off light (on water they splash), which are not things you expect stones to do.
I could make an attempt to define the core of the poems. If you think about Flemish paintings, a lot of them are religious, and they show either martyrdoms or contacts with the divine, such as the annunciation. These moments are profoundly atypical, and that is the basis for choosing them as subjects of representation. If you think about Dutch paintings, you are typically seeing domestic scenes, which are realistic in the sense that what they are showing is present to the senses – not divine or lethal. The scenes are usually tranquil, and they are often typical – a scene which you could often have seen repeated. This opposition can shed light on Pugh – her poems are like Dutch paintings in the features just described. There is a moment when the critic Christopher Whyte remarks that Mackay Brown's work aestheticises violence – explanations for this vary but it is certainly violent death is at the heart of Brown’s idea of art, the way he selects moments to describe. Pugh very rarely describes deaths – although there are memorable instances for the sailor René Bellot, died searching for Franklin, and a soldier in Napoleonic service who was buried at Vilnius in Lithuania. So a death every hundred pages, maybe. Pugh’s poems are profoundly probable. They create a likeness of the world of the senses, and of the world that empathy discloses to us. They don’t deal with saints, heroes, hysterics. At the core, the poems consistently present a credible likeness of something, and that something is always probable.
My impression is that the poems do not imitate the voice of the characters and also do not imitate the voice of the poet – which would get in the way of hearing the characters. The function of establishing a situation and relationship between people is so central that expressive mimesis is forced to the edge. The qualities of lucidity and exposition reach alpha while the quality of expressivity stays at gamma. The voice is inventive but neutral. We don’t seem to get further as we go through 150 poems - we don’t have a fascinating personality to recover. There is no ideology (to use the terms of the time). However, the poet is more interested in writing about other people than in creating a monument to herself.
The density of output points to creative stability. The poems give the impression of stability and credibility and the continuity bears that out – underpinning the political judgements. A limited interest in experiment goes along with plausibility and conviction. Pugh does not have the casino belief of some people back in the Seventies, that in an immensely improbable event the familiar could be replaced by something completely unfamiliar, and that a radical discontinuity would erase present life to replace it with something which the participants could not foresee. That attitude went along with verbal paradoxes and sleights of hand, which Pugh does not deploy. Her poetry relies on what is probable: the scenes are easy to imagine because she evokes what is probable at each point. Her Left view of politics is convincing because we must find the probable more likely than the apocalyptic. Governemnt is based on data series, but not in the way a casino is.

If there is a central thing about Pugh, it is probably an interest in the autonomy of the characters she is describing – the priority is to satisfy our curiosity about them, but before that there is a valuation of them and an interest in their situations. An ethical stance is inevitably the point of departure for this, and this is the steady signal which we lock on to as we read. It could be annoying if the poet used the characters to make moral points – which would be what the reviewers picked up on, giving the poet marks for upholding conservative moral values. There was really a lot of that, in those decades, and poets tried to pass tests rather than to write good poems. Another feature which I could count, and graph, is the smug concluding quatrain. Pugh never writes one of those, as far as I can see. Pugh does not think she knows all the answers and apparently does not think preset answers actually exist. This was actually what was agitating conservatives, at the time.
The neatness may be an aesthetic in itself... I am not sure about this. All the poems are beautifully clear but the ideas didn’t seem to be enhanced by the regularity of form. Pugh didn’t spend the 80s talking about how dangerous radicalism was. Her poems are liberal and empathetic. She rarely sets up situations in which there are two possible outcomes and one is more just than the other– an elementary device of tension. This choice contributes to the stability of the poem; we empathise more because the situation seems real, rather than being a set-up to put over a pre-existing preference, political or moral. We focus more on the people as people. Yet, when Pugh talks about social arrangements, she always favours the powerless – tyranny comes over as widespread and evil. Many poets, in the 70s, saw society as unstable and about to lose itself in radical change – Pugh does not show Britain as being like that at all. The future is not an imminent and wonderful thing. But, this stability allows us, once again, to identify with the characters, and to see their predicament as deep and continuing. Pugh depicts the logic of events without seeing the outcome as admirable.

Subjectivity comes out in the choice of landscapes– in a whole series of poems set in the Arctic, related to the Franklin expedition. (Actually it is two sets, at pages 61-66 and 98-116 of the Selected Later Poems.) British poets have the habit of seeing such high latitudes as a product of the imagination, or as a scenery for imaginative expression. An early example is JF Hendry’s Marimarusa, not published until 1973 although it was composed around 1947. Another Forties poet, W.S. Graham, wrote about the Antarctic (probably) in Malcolm Mooney’s Land. The Franklin poems follow poems about Iceland in her 1979 book. It may be indicative for Pugh that she spends most time on Lady Franklin, Franklin's widow, who denied the status of widow in order to manipulate public opinion, back in Britain, to raise funds for search expeditions to find his crew and bring them back alive. Lady Franklin did not sail to Northern Canada. Pugh ignores spectacular polar landscapes in order to write about the character’s need to mix grief with practicality, and the need to market grief and convert it into a media story – unheroic but also original themes. Pugh seems at this point to be avoiding the transcendent, the superhuman scale.
The translations in the 1990 Selected are from German. One is from a poem by the Swiss poet JP Hebel, and deals with the idea that the city of Basel will one day be a ruin inhabited by wild animals. This reminded me of the modern Swiss poet, Hermann Burger, whose Kirchberger Idyllen are also an imitation of Hebel in some sense. I really liked Kirchberger Idyllen.
Conclusion? This is significant poetry and in an ideal world I would extend "Nothing is Being Suppressed" to include it. But, there it is. I couldn't write about all the significant poets writing in the 1970s. As for my notes, I think the Search function fails for a certain category of text files. And I have a few thousand files in that format.