Academic taste: Further comments
This is part of a series on the possibility of poetry being led astray by an elite, and the resentful thesis that multiple varieties of poetry have been suppressed (as opposed to being published even when no good in a very tolerant scene). Last time we discussed the existence of an “academic taste”, linked to reactions and feelings within university English Literature departments. People talk about this, often, in connection with the poets that academics find uninteresting. “Allott was an academic and his anthology confirmed the disappearance of a range of poets, including Noyes and Watson.” Anthologies can’t erase memories, but they do provide a focus for memory.
The argument about academic taste is roughly:
(1) academics have selective attention and are not interested by a great deal of poetry that the rest of the audience like
(2) most of the serious reviews are now written by academics (since about 1960?), and most books of poetry don’t get reviewed
(4) reviews and syllabus choices influence publishers a great deal, and also affect word of mouth and consumer choice
(5) and this affects the books that retailers stock
(6) the publishing and retailing businesses are paralysed by academic prestige and inhibited from publishing kinds of poetry which would sell (but which are disapproved of by conservative academics).
(4) and (5) just aren't true. This is where the theory falls down. (6) is almost completely untrue. We could add a final idea, that “the poetry which uses/imitates entire cognitive processes also used by academics is favoured by academics”.
As for (6), I would think that Oxford University Press and Carcanet do favour the academic taste. (That is, OUP did before they abandoned the contemporary poetry market.) But unsophisticated poets could get published somewhere else. Carcanet define and satisfy a specialist taste, they appeal to a particular sector of the market and it is clearly not true that they are preventing other publishers from being successful.
Palmer describes for us maybe ninety poets of the inter-war period who just aren't read today. In fact, none of them were intellectuals, and that is connected with Allott’s decision not to include them in his large-scale retrospective anthology in 1962. Many of them were very popular in their day. Certainly Noyes and Watson sold a lot of books. But the market abandoned them – this is a much larger-scale event than the rejection, much later, of such kitsch-nationalist poets by Allott, Ian Hamilton, or other compilers of standard works. The popular market is much more voracious in forgetting and throwing away than the academic world. Everyone forgets the cultural product of last week so that they can consume the product for this week. It’s part of the consumption process.
It is only fair to define Allott’s book as a sequel to Michael Roberts’ 1936 Faber Book of Modern Verse, since Allott accepts almost every British poet who was in the 1936 selection. The converse applies – Roberts purged a large (if indefinite) number of poets who were still alive and whom he effectively defined as irrelevant. Roberts says that he has selected only poets who seem relevant to the future– an untenable claim, since he can have had no accurate idea of what was going to happen next. Anyway, the work of purging was done by Roberts and the (ten years younger) Allott just followed his pattern. Allott seems keen to follow the detailed examination which Roberts extols as part of creating new values. The attention to detail is supposed to carry out the liberation from outmoded values. This is a trick – it is all too obvious that if JC Squire had examined poets closely he would have ended up choosing poets which suited his taste, and that Roberts and Allott used “objectivity” to select poems by other Oxford graduates.
The way in which close reading is used on the text while being rigorously not applied to the person reading the text is still irritating. Roberts and his allies seem to be taking over the whole poetic scene, including its past. Their own ideological composition is therefore of the highest interest. But they blank this out. The lens is strong enough to disperse most of the poets writing, as at 1936. but it is invisible to itself. Reflexivity is being fundamentally denied. Saying that you’re The Future doesn't really cut it.
I see the problem in a different way. Poets are paranoid about being ignored. The academic conversation does validate some things, but leaves out maybe 99% of the work that gets published. This makes academics a target for paranoia. I think this is irrational. Academics aren’t there to write testimonials for x thousand bad poetry books. To dwell on that – academic writing only has status because it eliminates what is irritating when you dwell on it. It may be that poetry gets forgotten on a large scale – this doesn't mean that academics have to remember all the poets whom everyone else forgets. Thinking that the formal record in magazines like Critical Quarterly is the record that counts is just the kind of error that makes people annoyed with academics. But wherever I take a close look, most of the books being sold are the ones not getting “serious critical attention”; the academic conversation, or the memory it sets up, gives a consistently misleading version of what we were actually reading – in 1930, 1965, or now. Most poetry is not satisfying to do a close reading of, or to write about. But it may actually be pleasurable – the illusion is when you decide that all poetry is more intelligent than popular music. Actually, a great deal of poetry is simple in the way that pop music is, and it can reach a large audience with those qualities.
Geoffrey Hill is the classic example of a poet fully absorbed by academic life, writing difficult and opaque work that many people do not find gratifying. The bibliography of academic work on Hill is formidable – he seems to be a “safety shot” for someone who wants to research the modern period but is also deeply conservative. He is a safe academic asset for the uninspired. But, simultaneously, he reaches a great many people who otherwise find modern poetry dumbed-down and poppy and trivial. He is not a cult figure, although he probably was in the 1950s: Allott forced him to supply an explanation of his poem before Allott would consent to include it. But, I don’t think he is a basis for generalisations about academic taste. He spent much time not producing anything, and much of his work is unsatisfying because he was determined to produce, without a winning idea. This connects with emotional processes in Hill, quite well known by now, and not with some secret rules of academic existence. Work like Mercian Hymns and Speech! Speech! is spontaneous and emotionally rewarding, and that just shows that much of his work is hard going because it cost him too much effort to write it. It didn't excite him.
Were Hill’s inhibitions related to high “academic" standards? maybe, but academic status also gives some people an unnecessarily high self-regard and a tendency to talk highly-educated nonsense without ever wanting to stop.
I have spent considerable time recently studying catalogues which list all, or most, of the poetry books published in a given year. I am not sure how productive this is. But it underlines how diverse the business is. If you actually look at all the books published in 1977, they include a dizzying variety of poetry, most of it bad I expect. Most of it certainly wasn't academic. There never was a "stranglehold" of the academics. As I said, a magazine like Critical Quarterly, reviewing maybe 1% of the books coming out, only reviewed books of interest to their audience, who were mostly English teachers. They didn't block anybody else from reaching an audience. This is just a myth.
Showing posts with label anti-modernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-modernism. Show all posts
Sunday, 15 November 2020
Wednesday, 11 November 2020
Herbert Palmer and the disappearance of entire swathes of poetry
Leering out of the Darkness: Herbert Palmer (1880-1961)
I have been reading about human fossils, and people winning arguments by making exact measurements. With poetry, you can’t zoom in and the results are not reproducible. People can’t agree whether something is made of stone, or of bone. Let alone whether it’s a rib or a talus.
The start point is a 1938 book by Palmer in which he abolishes modern poetry. The book is ‘Post Victorian Poetry’ and brief checks suggest that it remained in print until 1978. The key statement is this: "Surely Mr Eliot never intended The Waste Land to be taken quite so seriously, at least not quite so constructively, especially as it exhibits too many of the features of a hoax...If The Waste Land means anything to me in relation to 2030, it is that The Waste Land will truly be a waste land, unknown and unhonoured, leering out of the darkness at all other English poetry, which will be equally unknown and unhonoured." I have just ordered the book from the Internet, but I did read it about 25 years ago, so I know what the proposition is. Palmer was writing from the point of view that everything to do with Eliot was corrupting and menacing, and I come from the position that Eliot was the most significant poet between the wars, and fundamental to the poetic taste which has flourished since the last world war. There is a complete incompatibility between me and Palmer, and the question is whether we are all fundamentally different from each other and any public statement reflecting taste, e.g. claiming that Eliot was the vital poet in the inter-war era, is by nature unable to reflect a collective truth.
The point of this blog is not to resurrect Palmer (I think he was an idiot) but to explore the subjectivity inherent in the judgement of poetry. This is also the question of whether it is worthwhile writing about poetry (and whether I wasted 20 years when I was doing that every day). I am talking about a situation where I talk to an (imaginary) room with 100 people in it, expound very detailed and convincing views on several books of poetry, and at the end half the room disagree with me. That can’t be success. But there is another way of defining failure – if I read a book in a vanished style, say a book by Noyes or Palmer, and dislike it, that can be defined as a performance failure. Let’s draw the camera closer to home. I read Fiona Sampson’s “Beyond the Lyric”, about poetry roughly 2000 to 2014, and I couldn't relate to the judgements and descriptions at all. My stunned reaction was that maybe other people read my books and couldn't relate to those, either. I had written something like 2500 pages of criticism, so this was a big worry. Suppose Fiona read one of my books, would it mean anything to her? The pebble we are looking at… actually the pebble is me, and I’m just one of a million pebbles on the shore of a sea which makes pebbles to pass the time.
I think calling something “post Victorian poetry” is stupid. You can't describe an era by saying “the era when Victoria was not on the throne”. It is vacuous. My conclusion is that the logical title would have been “modern poetry” and Palmer already had traumatic associations with the word “modern” and was impelled to avoid it. Palmer’s subject area is roughly “everything EXCEPT modernity”, so he writes about whatever was not touched by stylistic reforms. There is an obvious link between this “refuge from modernity” and the UKIP style right-wing populism, which since about 2000 has been, largely, a reaction against globalisation, with (less centrally) a revolt against modern culture because the urge is against everything which the “metropolitan elite” like. There is a class of people for whom the word “modern” represents anxiety – and mention of “London-based literati” arouses suspicion.
Palmer’s attitude is roughly that, where there had been “legislation to change taste” between 1905 and 1938, he rejected the legislation in each case, so that he condemned the poetry welling up from each new idea and favoured the poetry which was written in a “refuge zone”, so out of fashion and ignoring the reforms of taste. This is useful because it sharpens our understanding of those legislative acts. They are the shared history of poetry, it would seem. It is especially interesting to examine poetry from the “refuge zone”, because that would shed light on what the reforms were, and what they were trying to do. We would like to know who originated the new ideas, and how they publicised their new ideas to a scattered world of readers (who were very attached to what they already liked). Is there a sociology of innovation? and, if so, which strata produce the innovations?
Actually, it is more accurate to say that Palmer’s taste froze at a certain point in his life. He finds the Georgian reforms quite acceptable but does not then go on to assimilate the new ideas of the 1920s.
There is another argument here. Culture makes people converge. You sit there in a reading, you all have the same reactions at the same moment. You breathe in synchrony. If you take part in poetry readings, and in reading poetry, for forty years, you naturally get closer to other people in the same scene. This makes it reasonable to think that you can speak to other people, reasonable to publish your judgements and expect them to be meaningful outside your own front door. Of course, it makes certain moments of the conversation developmental, because they are where you realise what other people's version is. You then converge on that, for the sake of the conversation and for the sake of poetry itself. Those moments are also where you realise what a poet is about, what they are aiming for. And the gratification in poetry is partly the pleasure of pleasing the poet – you get what they are saying and feel happy. The gratification is a conditioning stimulus, it affects how you react next time. It builds a new organ. You feel “symbolic” approval, and this is possibly what separates people who give a lot of time to culture from others who don’t. But the developmental moments are when you read a convincing page by a critic, for example, or look at the selection page of an anthology, or maybe at a publisher’s list. Those are moments when you find a piercing light being shed on your own reactions, but also a similar light poured onto other people's feelings. This lets you detect norms – and you are then able to assimilate them, maybe right away or maybe after a couple of years. To repeat, if you go through a lot of this you become aware of where other people's sensibility runs and of where you stand in relation to the “centre” of poetry. It is reasonable to think that there is a collective conversation about poetry, and that the poetry is an extension of the conversation. I like the sound of this. But that is why it is disturbing, or worthwhile, to read someone like Palmer and find that there was a completely different conversation going on, and that Palmer rejected every inter-war poet whom we still find interesting, while having an audience for his opinions, and a “constellation”, an “asset network” of anti-modern poets whom he favoured (and whom he thought were going to dominate the Future when all this materialist and urban frenzy had died away). Maybe we only remember one of several inter-war literary cultures. Maybe the majority of the reading public found “modernism” alien and not at all pleasurable.
I find that Palmer uses the word “Georgian revolt”. I find this interesting, because I picked it up from Robert H. Ross’s book (1965, English edition 1967) and used it as a chapter title (in a book called “Centre and periphery”). Is this from Palmer? or did someone, Edward Thomas maybe, use it around 1914? To be exact he has two chapters on the First and Second Georgian Revolts. So, apparently, I am recycling Palmer's idea. Another point is that Faber published Palmer’s book ‘Season and Festival’ in 1943, even though he had gone on record as the world's most determined anti-Eliot figure in 1938. Palmer published a poem called Cinder-Thursday (described in his book-list as “a parody”), which would seem to be a parody of 'Ash-Wednesday'. A bookseller describes it thus “A parody of T.E. Eliot's Wasteland and Ash Wednesday.” OK, Eliot didn’t mind being parodied. Not sure who this TE Eliot was.
Ancillary evidence is RL Mégroz’s book Modern English Poetry 1882-1932, published in 1933, which I used to have a copy of. I found it very sympathetic, but he seemed to like everything and in the end it wasn’t possible to read the scores of lesser poets whom he enjoyed. Mégroz is not even close to Palmer, or to other versions of the landscape as reflected by “The Faber Book of Modern verse”, 1936, or the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
Palmer makes visible a sort of absolute strangeness. His whole outlook on poetry is meaningless to me – a non-repeatable observation. I want to turn that strangeness into a pebble and hold it in my hand. And it cuts both ways – I represent absolute strangeness for another observer. Maybe even for someone the same age as me, but with different cultural assets or investments. I rely on the power of empathy to conclude that by writing for long enough I can make my reactions “learnable”, and so that the whole makes the individual parts clear.
That idea of agreeing “this one is a stone and that one's a piece of bone” does not seem possible to achieve for the period 1900 to 1938, certainly not for Palmer’s favoured poets, whom we now regard as kitsch and religion at one remove. I reported (in my previous four blogs) that empiricism was the successful reform of the early decades of the 20th C. However, at the outset there were probably readers who regarded such adherence to facts as inherently disappointing and unartistic, and felt that “verbal magic” was where poetry lived. “We” never means everyone.
I have been reading about human fossils, and people winning arguments by making exact measurements. With poetry, you can’t zoom in and the results are not reproducible. People can’t agree whether something is made of stone, or of bone. Let alone whether it’s a rib or a talus.
The start point is a 1938 book by Palmer in which he abolishes modern poetry. The book is ‘Post Victorian Poetry’ and brief checks suggest that it remained in print until 1978. The key statement is this: "Surely Mr Eliot never intended The Waste Land to be taken quite so seriously, at least not quite so constructively, especially as it exhibits too many of the features of a hoax...If The Waste Land means anything to me in relation to 2030, it is that The Waste Land will truly be a waste land, unknown and unhonoured, leering out of the darkness at all other English poetry, which will be equally unknown and unhonoured." I have just ordered the book from the Internet, but I did read it about 25 years ago, so I know what the proposition is. Palmer was writing from the point of view that everything to do with Eliot was corrupting and menacing, and I come from the position that Eliot was the most significant poet between the wars, and fundamental to the poetic taste which has flourished since the last world war. There is a complete incompatibility between me and Palmer, and the question is whether we are all fundamentally different from each other and any public statement reflecting taste, e.g. claiming that Eliot was the vital poet in the inter-war era, is by nature unable to reflect a collective truth.
The point of this blog is not to resurrect Palmer (I think he was an idiot) but to explore the subjectivity inherent in the judgement of poetry. This is also the question of whether it is worthwhile writing about poetry (and whether I wasted 20 years when I was doing that every day). I am talking about a situation where I talk to an (imaginary) room with 100 people in it, expound very detailed and convincing views on several books of poetry, and at the end half the room disagree with me. That can’t be success. But there is another way of defining failure – if I read a book in a vanished style, say a book by Noyes or Palmer, and dislike it, that can be defined as a performance failure. Let’s draw the camera closer to home. I read Fiona Sampson’s “Beyond the Lyric”, about poetry roughly 2000 to 2014, and I couldn't relate to the judgements and descriptions at all. My stunned reaction was that maybe other people read my books and couldn't relate to those, either. I had written something like 2500 pages of criticism, so this was a big worry. Suppose Fiona read one of my books, would it mean anything to her? The pebble we are looking at… actually the pebble is me, and I’m just one of a million pebbles on the shore of a sea which makes pebbles to pass the time.
I think calling something “post Victorian poetry” is stupid. You can't describe an era by saying “the era when Victoria was not on the throne”. It is vacuous. My conclusion is that the logical title would have been “modern poetry” and Palmer already had traumatic associations with the word “modern” and was impelled to avoid it. Palmer’s subject area is roughly “everything EXCEPT modernity”, so he writes about whatever was not touched by stylistic reforms. There is an obvious link between this “refuge from modernity” and the UKIP style right-wing populism, which since about 2000 has been, largely, a reaction against globalisation, with (less centrally) a revolt against modern culture because the urge is against everything which the “metropolitan elite” like. There is a class of people for whom the word “modern” represents anxiety – and mention of “London-based literati” arouses suspicion.
Palmer’s attitude is roughly that, where there had been “legislation to change taste” between 1905 and 1938, he rejected the legislation in each case, so that he condemned the poetry welling up from each new idea and favoured the poetry which was written in a “refuge zone”, so out of fashion and ignoring the reforms of taste. This is useful because it sharpens our understanding of those legislative acts. They are the shared history of poetry, it would seem. It is especially interesting to examine poetry from the “refuge zone”, because that would shed light on what the reforms were, and what they were trying to do. We would like to know who originated the new ideas, and how they publicised their new ideas to a scattered world of readers (who were very attached to what they already liked). Is there a sociology of innovation? and, if so, which strata produce the innovations?
Actually, it is more accurate to say that Palmer’s taste froze at a certain point in his life. He finds the Georgian reforms quite acceptable but does not then go on to assimilate the new ideas of the 1920s.
There is another argument here. Culture makes people converge. You sit there in a reading, you all have the same reactions at the same moment. You breathe in synchrony. If you take part in poetry readings, and in reading poetry, for forty years, you naturally get closer to other people in the same scene. This makes it reasonable to think that you can speak to other people, reasonable to publish your judgements and expect them to be meaningful outside your own front door. Of course, it makes certain moments of the conversation developmental, because they are where you realise what other people's version is. You then converge on that, for the sake of the conversation and for the sake of poetry itself. Those moments are also where you realise what a poet is about, what they are aiming for. And the gratification in poetry is partly the pleasure of pleasing the poet – you get what they are saying and feel happy. The gratification is a conditioning stimulus, it affects how you react next time. It builds a new organ. You feel “symbolic” approval, and this is possibly what separates people who give a lot of time to culture from others who don’t. But the developmental moments are when you read a convincing page by a critic, for example, or look at the selection page of an anthology, or maybe at a publisher’s list. Those are moments when you find a piercing light being shed on your own reactions, but also a similar light poured onto other people's feelings. This lets you detect norms – and you are then able to assimilate them, maybe right away or maybe after a couple of years. To repeat, if you go through a lot of this you become aware of where other people's sensibility runs and of where you stand in relation to the “centre” of poetry. It is reasonable to think that there is a collective conversation about poetry, and that the poetry is an extension of the conversation. I like the sound of this. But that is why it is disturbing, or worthwhile, to read someone like Palmer and find that there was a completely different conversation going on, and that Palmer rejected every inter-war poet whom we still find interesting, while having an audience for his opinions, and a “constellation”, an “asset network” of anti-modern poets whom he favoured (and whom he thought were going to dominate the Future when all this materialist and urban frenzy had died away). Maybe we only remember one of several inter-war literary cultures. Maybe the majority of the reading public found “modernism” alien and not at all pleasurable.
I find that Palmer uses the word “Georgian revolt”. I find this interesting, because I picked it up from Robert H. Ross’s book (1965, English edition 1967) and used it as a chapter title (in a book called “Centre and periphery”). Is this from Palmer? or did someone, Edward Thomas maybe, use it around 1914? To be exact he has two chapters on the First and Second Georgian Revolts. So, apparently, I am recycling Palmer's idea. Another point is that Faber published Palmer’s book ‘Season and Festival’ in 1943, even though he had gone on record as the world's most determined anti-Eliot figure in 1938. Palmer published a poem called Cinder-Thursday (described in his book-list as “a parody”), which would seem to be a parody of 'Ash-Wednesday'. A bookseller describes it thus “A parody of T.E. Eliot's Wasteland and Ash Wednesday.” OK, Eliot didn’t mind being parodied. Not sure who this TE Eliot was.
Ancillary evidence is RL Mégroz’s book Modern English Poetry 1882-1932, published in 1933, which I used to have a copy of. I found it very sympathetic, but he seemed to like everything and in the end it wasn’t possible to read the scores of lesser poets whom he enjoyed. Mégroz is not even close to Palmer, or to other versions of the landscape as reflected by “The Faber Book of Modern verse”, 1936, or the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
Palmer makes visible a sort of absolute strangeness. His whole outlook on poetry is meaningless to me – a non-repeatable observation. I want to turn that strangeness into a pebble and hold it in my hand. And it cuts both ways – I represent absolute strangeness for another observer. Maybe even for someone the same age as me, but with different cultural assets or investments. I rely on the power of empathy to conclude that by writing for long enough I can make my reactions “learnable”, and so that the whole makes the individual parts clear.
That idea of agreeing “this one is a stone and that one's a piece of bone” does not seem possible to achieve for the period 1900 to 1938, certainly not for Palmer’s favoured poets, whom we now regard as kitsch and religion at one remove. I reported (in my previous four blogs) that empiricism was the successful reform of the early decades of the 20th C. However, at the outset there were probably readers who regarded such adherence to facts as inherently disappointing and unartistic, and felt that “verbal magic” was where poetry lived. “We” never means everyone.
Friday, 14 December 2018
Critique of the metropolitan elite
Critique of the metropolitan elite
Intro. This follows up previous postings on Ken Smith, and on the relationship of UKIP to poetry (March 2017 and November 2018). It discusses the rejection of the most cultured tier of individuals as those most qualified to judge poetry, and suggests a link between this and a rejection of professional politicians in politics. It discusses the roles of Bloodaxe and Carcanet as the major publishing outcome of the 1970s turmoil, and why these publishers rejected poetry written in the modern style.
The rise of UKIP to win 18% of the vote in the 2015 general election, and the results of the referendum on membership of the European Union, were generally analysed by politologists as reflecting the protest of individuals, who felt themselves to be left behind, against metropolitan elites and their narratives. Xenophobia was well to the fore, but this was not the original policy platform of UKIP, and hostility towards an elite at Brussels was partly a reflection of hostility towards bankers and the political class at Westminster (provoked by the MPs’ expenses scandal). UKIP voters were, statistically, much less well educated than the population as a whole, and UKIP stood for rejection of the idea that “the highly educated should rule because they are better qualified to do it”. This attack on elites fairly obviously mirrors a line in poetry which also rejects the elite and which has expressed itself typically through jacket texts and passing grumbles. Because the anti-metropolitan groundswell in politics is so important, it attracts symbolism: if you use vaguely anti-metropolitan symbolism, it is going to be attracted to the structure of feeling around the rejection of the main political parties and of parliament, because that structure is so big that its gravitational attraction is not resistible.
The inability of the “managers” to conduct the business is shown in the difference between the poetry which sells and the noble discourse around poetry. There is a stratum which has as features low prestige- low participation – high resentment. As it follows, that layer also does not ascribe prestige to the high-prestige literary taste and its owners. The UKIP constituency is typically resentful and non-participating – a refuge in sulking which is very common in the poetry world. There is a layer which has high resentment but also, it seems, high-prestige manners.
As I write, you can go into a pub and find the house magazine of the corporation which owns it denouncing the metropolitan elite, as if whatever they said was inevitably untrue. The editorials by Tim Martin, in the pub hand-out, bear an unmistakable resemblance to the Introduction to Poetry With an Edge. The Seventies saw a swarm of small to micro poetry publishers, but the ones who survived to publish, eventually, hundreds of titles were Bloodaxe and Carcanet. Arguably, the presence of these two new firms, trying to break new poets in the High Street, was the tangible outcome of the Seventies. Their achievements were great in terms of keeping the shelves filled and finding an alliance of sensibility (which manifests, yes, as a market). The period after 1968 saw a polygon of ideals where hippies, Marxists, the New Age, Blake followers, new myth, and the experimental freedom of the alternative poetry vied to be at centre stage. Carcanet and Bloodaxe each represented a literary myth, but did not take on any of these ideals. The decay of these ideals has been taken as way of defining the 1980s. To understand the 1980s, you have to study Carcanet’s position statements, and the introduction to Poetry With an Edge. To put it another way, you can learn a lot by superimposing the two “alternative” sections of the new british poetry (1988), the Carcanet 1983 statement Some Contemporary Poets, and Bloodaxe’s Poetry with an Edge (1988). While they all cover the same period and its new poets, they barely overlap at all. This gives a significant way of defining the literary elite – if we see these three artistic proposals as offers to function as an elite, we can conclude that every elite is a minority and there is no consensus. In fact, the elite is hopelessly split, and in this new configuration looks remarkably like a market-place in which many brands compete for attention.
I am writing about these firms with relation to the 1980s, and it is clear that their policies changed radically with time, so that generalisations true at one point cease to be true. To put that another way, their poets also changed with time.
Bloodaxe started from Ken Smith, and made his limitations into a perimeter. The jacket of The Poet Reclining quotes Charles Boyle saying “many (of the poems) have the harsh simplicity of Anglo-Saxon or other oral verse.” To get with this, we have to get with a formation of taste. Such a formation holds assets which rise or sinks in value with the passage of time. A review of a 1960 book by John Holloway says “The poems display a sensuousness, a feeling for tangs, hardnesses, distances, for the muscularity of nature.” Thirty-six years later, the cover of the 2018 Smith Collected also says the poems are “muscular”. This formation shares, roughly, a belief in terseness and gruffness as masculinity and authenticity. Writing in stone is especially good because of its stiffness and, if vertical, erectness. Anglo-Saxon style features are admired because they are irreducible, terse, and, obviously, highly masculine. I suppose that in the 1960s reviewers explained what they wanted and poets tried to give it to them. The end of the age of ideology left reviewers clamouring for poetry about objects and physical work. A point of culmination might be the passage in part 1 of Briggflatts (1966), where the poet says, rather sententiously, that his message must be carved in stone because anything else is too soft. This equates poetic significance with stoniness. Descriptions of objects are admired and either introspection or abstraction are seen as anti-poetic: language has to stay with the concrete even if human beings flourish in feelings and ideas. This formation includes an admiration for the working class, seen as authentic because its members deal with objects and physical problems demanding strength. They take part in struggles. (This version has a male-only working class and they work only in demanding physical jobs.) Their distaste for abstraction correlates with a lack of abstract values like wealth, and of cultural capital.
It is not clear to me why Close Reading made certain moments of the poetic cycle unfashionable. It would be possible to read a text closely and favour any aspect of it. But evidently Close Reading disfavoured poems about ideas and feelings, and poems about objects and sensations, which apparently were more verifiable, and involved the poet’s personality less, were less subject to collapse in the classroom.
I quoted that book jacket because my perception is that this ideology about objects being more poetic than abstractions belongs to the early 1960s and late 1950s. This is part of my feelings of doubt that you can claim it as defining the new poetry after 1980. Bloodaxe have claimed at various times that they have caused a revolution, and that Ken Smith, their figurehead, was “the godfather of the New Poetry” and “inspired a whole generation”. These claims seem implausible to me, and the way they are made, without any detail or argument to back them up, is typical of populism, where statements are not based on truth but on wishes. To make that clearer, the proposal that the new poetry of 1980 to 2000 was inspired by Ken Smith, and that the new thing during that period was represented by Bloodaxe poets, rather than by poets using innovative language and reacting to theory, is not credible. These are ideas which only work in connection with property – the context of selling a book and of claiming territory for the author (whose book you are trying to sell). They are quite different from statements made because they are true. To get at the real history of our lives, you have to strip away the territorial claims and self-exculpations.
This version of terseness could evolve into dumbing-down. That is the way you end up going when you discard ideas (as middle-class nonsense, or whatever). I think that some ideas have arrived since Anglo-Saxon times, which they did not have words for. In linguistics, a word is correct because a speech community accepts it as such, and in poetry we have to accept the power to legislate of social formations, small communities. The “objects are more authentic than ideas” party have had their successes, over the past fifty years. Of course, what Astley did as an entrepreneur was significant, and as we recover his commercial sensibility, in a vigorous propaganda through book jackets and so on, we find that it was popular. His ideology, with its components of a theory of style change over time, of authenticity, a local vocabulary which embodied preconceptions about poems, the pattern into which it fitted various contemporary poets as assets or witnesses, is a part of history and needs to be recovered. The cover of the 2018 Collected has that nutty claim that Smith inspired “an entire generation”; I think we could rewrite it to say that Smith “inspired Neil Astley”. I am not aware of any significant poetry inspired by Smith. (With an exception – Ranter is based on Fox Running. But Barry copied Smith because he thought he could do better, at every level.) I understand that Astley hates the word “dumbing down”, but it is possible both to attribute a downer than down quality to much of Bloodaxe’s project and to admire him for reaching a new market which didn’t want difficult poetry. I started out as a rock fan, and the idea of simplicity and repetition doesn’t have the same negative charge for rockists that it does for academics.
The Introduction mentioned has two passages in which Astley dismisses the poetry which existed before Bloodaxe came along to legitimise the territory. One deals with literary poetry, one with the Alternative. The latter presents him as sitting harmlessly in the pub when someone sells him a magazine in the modern style, which he reads and finds to be full of meaningless advanced experimentation. Even though he claims to have only seen one issue of one magazine, he decides that this sums up a whole sector, and gives us 250 words to display his expertise from this wide exposure. The detail about him encountering this magazine shows that his knowledge is worthless – we cannot take it as of any value, since he has only seen one issue of one magazine. In fact, his belief that it represents the Alternative is unconvincing, since that would imply he knew the field and could recognise whether the magazine was ‘alternative’ or not. The subtext is “you’re stupid like I am”. The focus is featureless warmth, it is an anecdote about Astley and not about the range of poetry being created in Britain. Ignorant yet authoritative– this is the authentic Farage touch. It is hardly surprising that he does not say “in selecting poets for Bloodaxe, I looked for a style which had already been around for 20 years” – this would imply an overview which would imply possession of knowledge, and he is keen to present himself as someone who does not have knowledge. The fact that he does not mention the name of any older poet, of any anthology of older or even contemporary verse, or any name of any critic or magazine discussing modern verse, shows that all that connoisseurship, that scholarship, is meaningless to him – his ignorance qualifies him because it means that he does not share in the fatal flaws of the elite. Culture corrupts those who practice it.
Carcanet seized a literary wish-world in which there would never be any dumbing down, there would never be any breach between new poetry and the internalised love objects of classical English literature, where every text would have been made to withstand Close Reading, where there was no trace of invading Pop culture, where the poets stood up to moral examination and could defend their work as acting out a set of moral values. It would not invite mediagenic poets. The poetry would be free of the narcissistic pseudo-spirituality of Beat. It would be free of drugged/guru explanations of the cosmos. It would contain precise observations. All these values enacted inhibitions and the cumulative effect blocked off most poetic impulses. The aggregate was profoundly attractive and by being stable created an emotional place which created a following, a company to be found in that place. The word neo-conservative was uttered. With Carcanet, the myth is about conservatism. Carcanet gave a robust valuation to the assets or beliefs which their market, of Eng. Lit. Academics, already possessed. This consensus was hesitant about the British Poetry Revival (and also about the avant garde of the 1940s) and was not necessarily looked up to by the wider poetry market (their ex-pupils).
Bloodaxe also offered a wish-world. Once you have piled up assets like {gruff, authentic, Northern, hills, Anglo-Saxon, hard, rugged, physical, working class} a significant fraction of the audience have already surrendered. It was an emotional place which many people wanted to spend time in. This line flourished in Stand, which Smith co-edited in the Sixties, and in the North. Smith got it from Jon Silkin and Ted Hughes. It flourished, from 1978, in Bloodaxe Books. It took on Bunting as an anti-abstract poet but rejected everything else about modernism. Later, it took on Smith and Pickard but rejected all the rest of the New Thing of the Sixties and Seventies, as defined by Mottram. It was puzzling how a style which in Smith was an expression of poverty and alienation, even nervous breakdown, could be presented in many younger poets as normal and even desirable. Perhaps it was asserting regional identity by discarding all the innovations of the previous 20 years – the metropolitan sacrifice. Fine words did not flourish north of Trent.
If I keep going on about book jackets, it is because I see them as part of the retail experience, which is one of the core social events of poetry. There is a gap between books about poetry and reviews, and another gap between reviews and jacket blurbs, but perhaps the blurbs are the closest to what readers want and find most persuasive. That is, shoppers may regard the blurbs as monomaniac distortions and partial truths, but they may not identify at all with the reviews or history books (which are usually 20 years behind the times). I think it is likely that there are no books which record the artistic ideology of Bloodaxe, which is clearly documented through their book jackets. Jacket texts record a certain history of British poetry, covering a wide area which never makes it into the formal, academic record at all. They describe thrills which aren’t actually available in the poems, but that is a trace of desires and fantasies which is of value in itself, and could even trace the designs of the poems. The jacket may, therefore, supply a way of measuring the failure of the poems. Further, the way the blurbs change traces a chronology which we should certainly be aware of. Things do change from time to time!
The anti-elite position is acted out in verse by Ken Smith and Peter Reading, particular. Smith attacks abstraction, in an interview. He says “I tend to avoid the Latin words. I tend to avoid the abstract words. What I like is the concrete image for things and Anglo-Saxon provides that all the time.”. This carries the latent anti-elite nisus. The people who understand abstractions are obviously educated and metropolitan and in positions of influence. They are part of the elite. This gives us a new idea of stylistics – we can equate use of advanced and differentiated vocabulary with acceptance of elite values. Conversely, use of repetitive concrete vocabulary may be a protest (or a sign of limited intellectual skills). I doubt that abstractions are meaningless, and I think further that the natural state for humans is to master abstract nouns, to be self-conscious and to record the reasoning which is inherent in that state, to have feelings and to interrogate them, to know other conscious humans and to engage in argument with them. To avoid this domain of language within poetry is to simplify natural language. Eschewing abstraction is a form of purity of diction which, like other purities, paints poetry into a corner where it must repeat gestures. However, the silencing of elite language is also a criticism of the people who use elite language. This is more to the fore in Reading, whose entire work can be seen as something deliberately ugly, linguistically damaged, full of unresolved conflicts and frustration, and as an attack on the people in charge, the ones who offer harmony as a way forward. His poems do not display reasoning because he dislikes the people who use reason. He is psychologically close to the UKIP camp.
If you eliminate abstract words, you come down to something chthonic, archaic, deprived of the modern senses. The purging of Latin and French vocabulary is the clearest expression of resentment of elite innovations and Continental influences. It extends the resentment back beyond the EU accession, into the Middle Ages. Foreign things are inherently wrong. The Bloodaxe book on Ken Smith (You Again) makes much of the Anglo-Saxon quality of his work, also in rhythm. This is seen as authenticity – but not as fear of the French. (To clarify – domestic elites structurally have skill in French and Latin vocabulary, and the protest is against domestic elites. It is not at all a protest against French people, Normans, or Romans, but about British people.)
It is characteristic of a populist resentment that it ignores differences between various sectors which it wants to attack. But it is characteristic of elite individuals to differentiate themselves as much as possible, using and re-using the fine distinctions which Bourdieu talks about.
Education is bound to meritocracy and is seen as hierarchical by the people inside it, who manage it. It follows that some intellectual assets are more valuable than others. It follows then that some assets in reading and talking about literature are more valuable than others. It seems fairly clear that Theory is regarded as more prestigious than scholars who merely describe texts and assess their artistic qualities. The advent of Theory was tangled up with the student revolts of 1968 and adjacent years. The reaction of scholars of older generations to these events, French theory and students denouncing their elders, was not always either of welcome or of submission. The advent of a new elite did not see the elite in possession willing to withdraw. The role of theory is to separate high and low in an industry where ranking and assessment are one of the central, daily activities. What stands out more clearly in this educational context is that those with the top assets believe in hierarchy and those without them believe in solidarity.
I found a series of articles on Fascist writers in PN Review in 1978-9. The series seemed to express a passive-aggressive stance. The series seemed pointless because it was going back to the Thirties, and obviously avoided dealing with the situation of 1979, surely full of fascinating and creative poets. PNR was not a pro-Fascist magazine in the broad sense – they weren’t even trying to clear the names of those shunned figures. Schmidt had left-wing sympathies, although he did not like hippies. But they certainly wanted to undermine the people who saw connections between ideology and literature and wanted political readings of literary classics. For example, who wanted literature to promote change in society, and literary scholarship to promote changes in culture. The series seems to be drawn by guilt; breezy left-wing thinkers who denounced writers for backing Hitler and Mussolini are being framed as villains for doing so. But the concept is not to vindicate the writers who got into fascism when it was lucrative to do so – guilt is not being denied and is actually part of the appeal. There seems to be a vicarious quality about this– it speaks for conservative and middle-aged academics who know they aren’t very progressive or brilliant and who resent having their failings being called out. The central point is that they don’t disagree with the accusations– the emotional appeal starts with guilt and is a way of soothing it.
People who can’t compete, culturally, want a refugium where they are protected from losing. The idea of refugium applies even to literary academics. I think quite a few people felt that the gurus, first of all, (later, the “post-structuralists”) were brilliant and opening new worlds, but they personally had no ability to do that and wanted a safe place where they didn’t have to encounter these radical ideas. I spoke of featureless warmth as something distinctive for populist discourse. That is, closeness is offered in the absence of evidence or argument. There is a favoured spot for someone educated, where they believe that people who know more than they do are distantiated and inauthentic, people who know less than they do are locally bound, ignorant, and confused, but people who know what they know are simply in the right place. You can see that it is uncomfortable to have any other view of the cultural geography. It is possible that poetry, in the contemporary condition, offers a remedy which reassures people of the value of their cultural assets: bringing comfort, at the expense of course of reducing doubt and making change less likely. It is also possible that we can relate the ideology of given publishers, their brand image, to a comfort zone and to specific valuations of specific cultural assets.
In that PNR series, Michael Hamburger wrote very interestingly on Gottfried Benn. Benn produced an ardently pro-Nazi lecture in 1933. Then he found out that they regarded him as a degenerate. And he had a publication ban. If Hitler says you are unconsciously anti-Nazi, does that mean you are anti-Nazi or that you are consciously pro-Nazi and, as an intellectual, it is your conscious beliefs which count? You do want to read this, no question.
Where grand theory offers idealism, an ideal society (even if after a thousand-year delay), it is clear that populism does not offer ideals, or ideas. It is plausible that populism is involved with feelings of shame – positions which the liberal thought-world condemns. The populist response is not disagreement but resentment with agreement. They do not feel pride in cultural assets which they do not possess. They think their assets are inferior.
I suppose that a whole sector of poets is separate because their poetry comes out of idealism and theory. That is, they have the ability to move from abstract thought into a poem. They have speculated, and their style is what speculation gives them rather than being something awkward and clumsy, the legacy of older speech. It is hardly in debate that this poetry is high, and poetry which merely reproduces memory, with limited patterning, is low. But it is also likely that poetry of this kind also evokes anti-metropolitan resentments, and that the whole complex of resentment which produced the soaring voting figures of UKIP is also engaged in the resistance to elevated poetry. The more this poetry reflects psychological freedom, the more it makes people feel their own limitations. Also, once you go there, you don’t really want to be anywhere else.
Bloodaxe took their name from a character in Briggflatts, and Carcanet issued what looks like an ideologically regulated version of modern history – Under Briggflatts (by Donald Davie). Davie had been an editor of PN Review, the public voice of Carcanet. The clamour for poems about the sense record, about objects and tools, was prevalent in the late Fifties and early Sixties. It is curious to see this wing where Bloodaxe and Carcanet touch each other. Both publishers claimed Bunting as the founder of modern poetry – incredibly. Bloodaxe merged Bunting and Smith as icons of modernity. Neither publisher had any space for the British Poetry Revival, for radical lifestyles, or for the poetic Left. (Some details – Bunting’s poem mentions Eirik Bloodaxe, king of York, and includes a passage about lines of verse being so terribly important that they should be carved in stone– with an edged tool, obviously. The flagship anthology Poetry with an Edge refers back to that edge, the stonemason’s chisel, and to the axe which Eirik liked to use on his subjects. Bloodaxe’s leading figures were Ken Smith and Bunting, fused together as poets who cut out all abstract words. In the first 120 pages of his 1982 collected poems, Smith used the word “stone” 100 times, and this is also fused with the writing in stone which Bunting longed for.)
Davie identified himself with the Movement, saw himself as its chief ideological manager, and seems to have had some animus against all the poets who arrived on the scene after the Movement (i.e. after about 1956). His book about poetry 1960 to 1988 is essentially a campaign to wipe out rivals. What is being offered is more like “Bunting is a legitimation for all the British poetry which survives after we have eliminated from view all the poets who could actually write”. This is a different proposition from a history of the time. On examination, the poets being excluded and off-mapped could be defined either as “poets influenced by American poetry” or “poets who want to write about ideas within the poem”. Briggflatts was consecrated as a poem about autobiography where ideas played no role, there were only experiences, primarily of objects. I think Bunting has been instrumentalised, and in more than one way. It is almost as if he had been defined as the decommissioned form of modernism, and by claiming him you could promote deeply unintellectual and in fact tedious poetry, while also claiming to be part of the modernist heritage. What set fire to the new ranges of the 1960s was certainly the American poetry (in Donald Allen’s anthology, as a gateway) rather than Briggflatts. Bunting’s poem of old age is too weary and resigned to set a new wave of poetry off.
What Bloodaxe and Carcanet had in common was a distaste for talking about feelings – the impulse was to describe objects or living things but strip them of any symbolic value. This was felt as an escape from ideology. Ideas and feelings somehow belonged together, and both represented an egoism, or risk-taking, which they were saying No to. The new poetry was not going to find its way away from “small presses” and into the bookshops so easily.
Carcanet included several different currents of ideas in the 1980s, and evolved steadily during their long history. The anthology Some Contemporary Poets was a programme statement for Carcanet as it was in 1983, not necessarily five years later. Under Briggflatts was a statement of position for Donald Davie, but, even though Carcanet published it, it is not necessarily true that other players in the Carcanet team shared its ideas, for example its negativity about poetry after 1960.
To reiterate, Ford and Goodwin’s book (Revolt on the Right) raises questions that need to be addressed, and the issue concerning them is less about the merits of a possible UKIP government than about the long-term decline of the major political parties. The decline of the elite can be connected with the greater political awareness, and better access to (non-print) information, of the lower classes – the decline of deference. This basic state of affairs will persist even if UKIP disappear from the scene. Leaving the European Union is an issue which has pitched the graduates (dare we say, graduate class) against the non-graduates, but it is only one of a whole series of issues which expose a similar opposition, because that opposition is structural and runs very deep. Conversely, the anti-elite current in poetry can carry a wide variety of messages, and is not straightforwardly an artistic error. Because the relationship between the highly educated and the bottom 40% is so important, or because modern life is so complicated that only theory can really help modern government, this object: abstract, or Germanic: Latinate, opposition is a stylistic means through which significant messages can be written.
Literature is, to generalise, about shared feelings displayed through symbolism. We have been talking about feelings which are inside the cone of silence, which were not shown in shared symbolism, which were private and to some extent shameful. There is another category, of feelings which were shameful but which are shared, which are the material of an alliance which can affect public life, and which are perhaps the inexplicit content of symbolism or the content of inexplicit symbolism.
There are two results for the attack on the elites. First, a shift of perspective whereby you see a group of culturally expert people as carrying out a function, not just being natural and seeking pleasure but as enthralled to other people and providing services to them which can be criticised like other commodities. People would not necessarily agree what these services do or should consist of. Secondly, the ebb and flow of political power. The investment of the elite is not secure. The elite as promoters may be faced with the refusal of the public to consume what they offer, or with surges where certain poets become unexpectedly popular. Commodities can fail in the market, and the retail arena is the decisive area. When waves of resentment billow up, from feminists, ethnic minorities, Marxists, outsiders, and so on, the ship changes course, and this is of great interest to participants.
As I write, the Brexit issue is tearing the country apart and even tearing both major political parties apart. Nobody really enjoys this level of division. The point of an education that makes you look at ideas is that thereafter ideas don’t become rigid and you don’t let them evolve into rigid political divisions. I find it incredible that any stylistic or cultural oppositions in poetry could be permanent, or that everything could rotate around them. In everyday speech, we use a mixture of Saxon, French, and Latin words all the time. Poetry is about shared feelings; its linguistic fabric is made up of moving semantic oppositions, but it is not an investment in permanent social oppositions.
Intro. This follows up previous postings on Ken Smith, and on the relationship of UKIP to poetry (March 2017 and November 2018). It discusses the rejection of the most cultured tier of individuals as those most qualified to judge poetry, and suggests a link between this and a rejection of professional politicians in politics. It discusses the roles of Bloodaxe and Carcanet as the major publishing outcome of the 1970s turmoil, and why these publishers rejected poetry written in the modern style.
The rise of UKIP to win 18% of the vote in the 2015 general election, and the results of the referendum on membership of the European Union, were generally analysed by politologists as reflecting the protest of individuals, who felt themselves to be left behind, against metropolitan elites and their narratives. Xenophobia was well to the fore, but this was not the original policy platform of UKIP, and hostility towards an elite at Brussels was partly a reflection of hostility towards bankers and the political class at Westminster (provoked by the MPs’ expenses scandal). UKIP voters were, statistically, much less well educated than the population as a whole, and UKIP stood for rejection of the idea that “the highly educated should rule because they are better qualified to do it”. This attack on elites fairly obviously mirrors a line in poetry which also rejects the elite and which has expressed itself typically through jacket texts and passing grumbles. Because the anti-metropolitan groundswell in politics is so important, it attracts symbolism: if you use vaguely anti-metropolitan symbolism, it is going to be attracted to the structure of feeling around the rejection of the main political parties and of parliament, because that structure is so big that its gravitational attraction is not resistible.
The inability of the “managers” to conduct the business is shown in the difference between the poetry which sells and the noble discourse around poetry. There is a stratum which has as features low prestige- low participation – high resentment. As it follows, that layer also does not ascribe prestige to the high-prestige literary taste and its owners. The UKIP constituency is typically resentful and non-participating – a refuge in sulking which is very common in the poetry world. There is a layer which has high resentment but also, it seems, high-prestige manners.
As I write, you can go into a pub and find the house magazine of the corporation which owns it denouncing the metropolitan elite, as if whatever they said was inevitably untrue. The editorials by Tim Martin, in the pub hand-out, bear an unmistakable resemblance to the Introduction to Poetry With an Edge. The Seventies saw a swarm of small to micro poetry publishers, but the ones who survived to publish, eventually, hundreds of titles were Bloodaxe and Carcanet. Arguably, the presence of these two new firms, trying to break new poets in the High Street, was the tangible outcome of the Seventies. Their achievements were great in terms of keeping the shelves filled and finding an alliance of sensibility (which manifests, yes, as a market). The period after 1968 saw a polygon of ideals where hippies, Marxists, the New Age, Blake followers, new myth, and the experimental freedom of the alternative poetry vied to be at centre stage. Carcanet and Bloodaxe each represented a literary myth, but did not take on any of these ideals. The decay of these ideals has been taken as way of defining the 1980s. To understand the 1980s, you have to study Carcanet’s position statements, and the introduction to Poetry With an Edge. To put it another way, you can learn a lot by superimposing the two “alternative” sections of the new british poetry (1988), the Carcanet 1983 statement Some Contemporary Poets, and Bloodaxe’s Poetry with an Edge (1988). While they all cover the same period and its new poets, they barely overlap at all. This gives a significant way of defining the literary elite – if we see these three artistic proposals as offers to function as an elite, we can conclude that every elite is a minority and there is no consensus. In fact, the elite is hopelessly split, and in this new configuration looks remarkably like a market-place in which many brands compete for attention.
I am writing about these firms with relation to the 1980s, and it is clear that their policies changed radically with time, so that generalisations true at one point cease to be true. To put that another way, their poets also changed with time.
Bloodaxe started from Ken Smith, and made his limitations into a perimeter. The jacket of The Poet Reclining quotes Charles Boyle saying “many (of the poems) have the harsh simplicity of Anglo-Saxon or other oral verse.” To get with this, we have to get with a formation of taste. Such a formation holds assets which rise or sinks in value with the passage of time. A review of a 1960 book by John Holloway says “The poems display a sensuousness, a feeling for tangs, hardnesses, distances, for the muscularity of nature.” Thirty-six years later, the cover of the 2018 Smith Collected also says the poems are “muscular”. This formation shares, roughly, a belief in terseness and gruffness as masculinity and authenticity. Writing in stone is especially good because of its stiffness and, if vertical, erectness. Anglo-Saxon style features are admired because they are irreducible, terse, and, obviously, highly masculine. I suppose that in the 1960s reviewers explained what they wanted and poets tried to give it to them. The end of the age of ideology left reviewers clamouring for poetry about objects and physical work. A point of culmination might be the passage in part 1 of Briggflatts (1966), where the poet says, rather sententiously, that his message must be carved in stone because anything else is too soft. This equates poetic significance with stoniness. Descriptions of objects are admired and either introspection or abstraction are seen as anti-poetic: language has to stay with the concrete even if human beings flourish in feelings and ideas. This formation includes an admiration for the working class, seen as authentic because its members deal with objects and physical problems demanding strength. They take part in struggles. (This version has a male-only working class and they work only in demanding physical jobs.) Their distaste for abstraction correlates with a lack of abstract values like wealth, and of cultural capital.
It is not clear to me why Close Reading made certain moments of the poetic cycle unfashionable. It would be possible to read a text closely and favour any aspect of it. But evidently Close Reading disfavoured poems about ideas and feelings, and poems about objects and sensations, which apparently were more verifiable, and involved the poet’s personality less, were less subject to collapse in the classroom.
I quoted that book jacket because my perception is that this ideology about objects being more poetic than abstractions belongs to the early 1960s and late 1950s. This is part of my feelings of doubt that you can claim it as defining the new poetry after 1980. Bloodaxe have claimed at various times that they have caused a revolution, and that Ken Smith, their figurehead, was “the godfather of the New Poetry” and “inspired a whole generation”. These claims seem implausible to me, and the way they are made, without any detail or argument to back them up, is typical of populism, where statements are not based on truth but on wishes. To make that clearer, the proposal that the new poetry of 1980 to 2000 was inspired by Ken Smith, and that the new thing during that period was represented by Bloodaxe poets, rather than by poets using innovative language and reacting to theory, is not credible. These are ideas which only work in connection with property – the context of selling a book and of claiming territory for the author (whose book you are trying to sell). They are quite different from statements made because they are true. To get at the real history of our lives, you have to strip away the territorial claims and self-exculpations.
This version of terseness could evolve into dumbing-down. That is the way you end up going when you discard ideas (as middle-class nonsense, or whatever). I think that some ideas have arrived since Anglo-Saxon times, which they did not have words for. In linguistics, a word is correct because a speech community accepts it as such, and in poetry we have to accept the power to legislate of social formations, small communities. The “objects are more authentic than ideas” party have had their successes, over the past fifty years. Of course, what Astley did as an entrepreneur was significant, and as we recover his commercial sensibility, in a vigorous propaganda through book jackets and so on, we find that it was popular. His ideology, with its components of a theory of style change over time, of authenticity, a local vocabulary which embodied preconceptions about poems, the pattern into which it fitted various contemporary poets as assets or witnesses, is a part of history and needs to be recovered. The cover of the 2018 Collected has that nutty claim that Smith inspired “an entire generation”; I think we could rewrite it to say that Smith “inspired Neil Astley”. I am not aware of any significant poetry inspired by Smith. (With an exception – Ranter is based on Fox Running. But Barry copied Smith because he thought he could do better, at every level.) I understand that Astley hates the word “dumbing down”, but it is possible both to attribute a downer than down quality to much of Bloodaxe’s project and to admire him for reaching a new market which didn’t want difficult poetry. I started out as a rock fan, and the idea of simplicity and repetition doesn’t have the same negative charge for rockists that it does for academics.
The Introduction mentioned has two passages in which Astley dismisses the poetry which existed before Bloodaxe came along to legitimise the territory. One deals with literary poetry, one with the Alternative. The latter presents him as sitting harmlessly in the pub when someone sells him a magazine in the modern style, which he reads and finds to be full of meaningless advanced experimentation. Even though he claims to have only seen one issue of one magazine, he decides that this sums up a whole sector, and gives us 250 words to display his expertise from this wide exposure. The detail about him encountering this magazine shows that his knowledge is worthless – we cannot take it as of any value, since he has only seen one issue of one magazine. In fact, his belief that it represents the Alternative is unconvincing, since that would imply he knew the field and could recognise whether the magazine was ‘alternative’ or not. The subtext is “you’re stupid like I am”. The focus is featureless warmth, it is an anecdote about Astley and not about the range of poetry being created in Britain. Ignorant yet authoritative– this is the authentic Farage touch. It is hardly surprising that he does not say “in selecting poets for Bloodaxe, I looked for a style which had already been around for 20 years” – this would imply an overview which would imply possession of knowledge, and he is keen to present himself as someone who does not have knowledge. The fact that he does not mention the name of any older poet, of any anthology of older or even contemporary verse, or any name of any critic or magazine discussing modern verse, shows that all that connoisseurship, that scholarship, is meaningless to him – his ignorance qualifies him because it means that he does not share in the fatal flaws of the elite. Culture corrupts those who practice it.
Carcanet seized a literary wish-world in which there would never be any dumbing down, there would never be any breach between new poetry and the internalised love objects of classical English literature, where every text would have been made to withstand Close Reading, where there was no trace of invading Pop culture, where the poets stood up to moral examination and could defend their work as acting out a set of moral values. It would not invite mediagenic poets. The poetry would be free of the narcissistic pseudo-spirituality of Beat. It would be free of drugged/guru explanations of the cosmos. It would contain precise observations. All these values enacted inhibitions and the cumulative effect blocked off most poetic impulses. The aggregate was profoundly attractive and by being stable created an emotional place which created a following, a company to be found in that place. The word neo-conservative was uttered. With Carcanet, the myth is about conservatism. Carcanet gave a robust valuation to the assets or beliefs which their market, of Eng. Lit. Academics, already possessed. This consensus was hesitant about the British Poetry Revival (and also about the avant garde of the 1940s) and was not necessarily looked up to by the wider poetry market (their ex-pupils).
Bloodaxe also offered a wish-world. Once you have piled up assets like {gruff, authentic, Northern, hills, Anglo-Saxon, hard, rugged, physical, working class} a significant fraction of the audience have already surrendered. It was an emotional place which many people wanted to spend time in. This line flourished in Stand, which Smith co-edited in the Sixties, and in the North. Smith got it from Jon Silkin and Ted Hughes. It flourished, from 1978, in Bloodaxe Books. It took on Bunting as an anti-abstract poet but rejected everything else about modernism. Later, it took on Smith and Pickard but rejected all the rest of the New Thing of the Sixties and Seventies, as defined by Mottram. It was puzzling how a style which in Smith was an expression of poverty and alienation, even nervous breakdown, could be presented in many younger poets as normal and even desirable. Perhaps it was asserting regional identity by discarding all the innovations of the previous 20 years – the metropolitan sacrifice. Fine words did not flourish north of Trent.
If I keep going on about book jackets, it is because I see them as part of the retail experience, which is one of the core social events of poetry. There is a gap between books about poetry and reviews, and another gap between reviews and jacket blurbs, but perhaps the blurbs are the closest to what readers want and find most persuasive. That is, shoppers may regard the blurbs as monomaniac distortions and partial truths, but they may not identify at all with the reviews or history books (which are usually 20 years behind the times). I think it is likely that there are no books which record the artistic ideology of Bloodaxe, which is clearly documented through their book jackets. Jacket texts record a certain history of British poetry, covering a wide area which never makes it into the formal, academic record at all. They describe thrills which aren’t actually available in the poems, but that is a trace of desires and fantasies which is of value in itself, and could even trace the designs of the poems. The jacket may, therefore, supply a way of measuring the failure of the poems. Further, the way the blurbs change traces a chronology which we should certainly be aware of. Things do change from time to time!
The anti-elite position is acted out in verse by Ken Smith and Peter Reading, particular. Smith attacks abstraction, in an interview. He says “I tend to avoid the Latin words. I tend to avoid the abstract words. What I like is the concrete image for things and Anglo-Saxon provides that all the time.”. This carries the latent anti-elite nisus. The people who understand abstractions are obviously educated and metropolitan and in positions of influence. They are part of the elite. This gives us a new idea of stylistics – we can equate use of advanced and differentiated vocabulary with acceptance of elite values. Conversely, use of repetitive concrete vocabulary may be a protest (or a sign of limited intellectual skills). I doubt that abstractions are meaningless, and I think further that the natural state for humans is to master abstract nouns, to be self-conscious and to record the reasoning which is inherent in that state, to have feelings and to interrogate them, to know other conscious humans and to engage in argument with them. To avoid this domain of language within poetry is to simplify natural language. Eschewing abstraction is a form of purity of diction which, like other purities, paints poetry into a corner where it must repeat gestures. However, the silencing of elite language is also a criticism of the people who use elite language. This is more to the fore in Reading, whose entire work can be seen as something deliberately ugly, linguistically damaged, full of unresolved conflicts and frustration, and as an attack on the people in charge, the ones who offer harmony as a way forward. His poems do not display reasoning because he dislikes the people who use reason. He is psychologically close to the UKIP camp.
If you eliminate abstract words, you come down to something chthonic, archaic, deprived of the modern senses. The purging of Latin and French vocabulary is the clearest expression of resentment of elite innovations and Continental influences. It extends the resentment back beyond the EU accession, into the Middle Ages. Foreign things are inherently wrong. The Bloodaxe book on Ken Smith (You Again) makes much of the Anglo-Saxon quality of his work, also in rhythm. This is seen as authenticity – but not as fear of the French. (To clarify – domestic elites structurally have skill in French and Latin vocabulary, and the protest is against domestic elites. It is not at all a protest against French people, Normans, or Romans, but about British people.)
It is characteristic of a populist resentment that it ignores differences between various sectors which it wants to attack. But it is characteristic of elite individuals to differentiate themselves as much as possible, using and re-using the fine distinctions which Bourdieu talks about.
Education is bound to meritocracy and is seen as hierarchical by the people inside it, who manage it. It follows that some intellectual assets are more valuable than others. It follows then that some assets in reading and talking about literature are more valuable than others. It seems fairly clear that Theory is regarded as more prestigious than scholars who merely describe texts and assess their artistic qualities. The advent of Theory was tangled up with the student revolts of 1968 and adjacent years. The reaction of scholars of older generations to these events, French theory and students denouncing their elders, was not always either of welcome or of submission. The advent of a new elite did not see the elite in possession willing to withdraw. The role of theory is to separate high and low in an industry where ranking and assessment are one of the central, daily activities. What stands out more clearly in this educational context is that those with the top assets believe in hierarchy and those without them believe in solidarity.
I found a series of articles on Fascist writers in PN Review in 1978-9. The series seemed to express a passive-aggressive stance. The series seemed pointless because it was going back to the Thirties, and obviously avoided dealing with the situation of 1979, surely full of fascinating and creative poets. PNR was not a pro-Fascist magazine in the broad sense – they weren’t even trying to clear the names of those shunned figures. Schmidt had left-wing sympathies, although he did not like hippies. But they certainly wanted to undermine the people who saw connections between ideology and literature and wanted political readings of literary classics. For example, who wanted literature to promote change in society, and literary scholarship to promote changes in culture. The series seems to be drawn by guilt; breezy left-wing thinkers who denounced writers for backing Hitler and Mussolini are being framed as villains for doing so. But the concept is not to vindicate the writers who got into fascism when it was lucrative to do so – guilt is not being denied and is actually part of the appeal. There seems to be a vicarious quality about this– it speaks for conservative and middle-aged academics who know they aren’t very progressive or brilliant and who resent having their failings being called out. The central point is that they don’t disagree with the accusations– the emotional appeal starts with guilt and is a way of soothing it.
People who can’t compete, culturally, want a refugium where they are protected from losing. The idea of refugium applies even to literary academics. I think quite a few people felt that the gurus, first of all, (later, the “post-structuralists”) were brilliant and opening new worlds, but they personally had no ability to do that and wanted a safe place where they didn’t have to encounter these radical ideas. I spoke of featureless warmth as something distinctive for populist discourse. That is, closeness is offered in the absence of evidence or argument. There is a favoured spot for someone educated, where they believe that people who know more than they do are distantiated and inauthentic, people who know less than they do are locally bound, ignorant, and confused, but people who know what they know are simply in the right place. You can see that it is uncomfortable to have any other view of the cultural geography. It is possible that poetry, in the contemporary condition, offers a remedy which reassures people of the value of their cultural assets: bringing comfort, at the expense of course of reducing doubt and making change less likely. It is also possible that we can relate the ideology of given publishers, their brand image, to a comfort zone and to specific valuations of specific cultural assets.
In that PNR series, Michael Hamburger wrote very interestingly on Gottfried Benn. Benn produced an ardently pro-Nazi lecture in 1933. Then he found out that they regarded him as a degenerate. And he had a publication ban. If Hitler says you are unconsciously anti-Nazi, does that mean you are anti-Nazi or that you are consciously pro-Nazi and, as an intellectual, it is your conscious beliefs which count? You do want to read this, no question.
Where grand theory offers idealism, an ideal society (even if after a thousand-year delay), it is clear that populism does not offer ideals, or ideas. It is plausible that populism is involved with feelings of shame – positions which the liberal thought-world condemns. The populist response is not disagreement but resentment with agreement. They do not feel pride in cultural assets which they do not possess. They think their assets are inferior.
I suppose that a whole sector of poets is separate because their poetry comes out of idealism and theory. That is, they have the ability to move from abstract thought into a poem. They have speculated, and their style is what speculation gives them rather than being something awkward and clumsy, the legacy of older speech. It is hardly in debate that this poetry is high, and poetry which merely reproduces memory, with limited patterning, is low. But it is also likely that poetry of this kind also evokes anti-metropolitan resentments, and that the whole complex of resentment which produced the soaring voting figures of UKIP is also engaged in the resistance to elevated poetry. The more this poetry reflects psychological freedom, the more it makes people feel their own limitations. Also, once you go there, you don’t really want to be anywhere else.
Bloodaxe took their name from a character in Briggflatts, and Carcanet issued what looks like an ideologically regulated version of modern history – Under Briggflatts (by Donald Davie). Davie had been an editor of PN Review, the public voice of Carcanet. The clamour for poems about the sense record, about objects and tools, was prevalent in the late Fifties and early Sixties. It is curious to see this wing where Bloodaxe and Carcanet touch each other. Both publishers claimed Bunting as the founder of modern poetry – incredibly. Bloodaxe merged Bunting and Smith as icons of modernity. Neither publisher had any space for the British Poetry Revival, for radical lifestyles, or for the poetic Left. (Some details – Bunting’s poem mentions Eirik Bloodaxe, king of York, and includes a passage about lines of verse being so terribly important that they should be carved in stone– with an edged tool, obviously. The flagship anthology Poetry with an Edge refers back to that edge, the stonemason’s chisel, and to the axe which Eirik liked to use on his subjects. Bloodaxe’s leading figures were Ken Smith and Bunting, fused together as poets who cut out all abstract words. In the first 120 pages of his 1982 collected poems, Smith used the word “stone” 100 times, and this is also fused with the writing in stone which Bunting longed for.)
Davie identified himself with the Movement, saw himself as its chief ideological manager, and seems to have had some animus against all the poets who arrived on the scene after the Movement (i.e. after about 1956). His book about poetry 1960 to 1988 is essentially a campaign to wipe out rivals. What is being offered is more like “Bunting is a legitimation for all the British poetry which survives after we have eliminated from view all the poets who could actually write”. This is a different proposition from a history of the time. On examination, the poets being excluded and off-mapped could be defined either as “poets influenced by American poetry” or “poets who want to write about ideas within the poem”. Briggflatts was consecrated as a poem about autobiography where ideas played no role, there were only experiences, primarily of objects. I think Bunting has been instrumentalised, and in more than one way. It is almost as if he had been defined as the decommissioned form of modernism, and by claiming him you could promote deeply unintellectual and in fact tedious poetry, while also claiming to be part of the modernist heritage. What set fire to the new ranges of the 1960s was certainly the American poetry (in Donald Allen’s anthology, as a gateway) rather than Briggflatts. Bunting’s poem of old age is too weary and resigned to set a new wave of poetry off.
What Bloodaxe and Carcanet had in common was a distaste for talking about feelings – the impulse was to describe objects or living things but strip them of any symbolic value. This was felt as an escape from ideology. Ideas and feelings somehow belonged together, and both represented an egoism, or risk-taking, which they were saying No to. The new poetry was not going to find its way away from “small presses” and into the bookshops so easily.
Carcanet included several different currents of ideas in the 1980s, and evolved steadily during their long history. The anthology Some Contemporary Poets was a programme statement for Carcanet as it was in 1983, not necessarily five years later. Under Briggflatts was a statement of position for Donald Davie, but, even though Carcanet published it, it is not necessarily true that other players in the Carcanet team shared its ideas, for example its negativity about poetry after 1960.
To reiterate, Ford and Goodwin’s book (Revolt on the Right) raises questions that need to be addressed, and the issue concerning them is less about the merits of a possible UKIP government than about the long-term decline of the major political parties. The decline of the elite can be connected with the greater political awareness, and better access to (non-print) information, of the lower classes – the decline of deference. This basic state of affairs will persist even if UKIP disappear from the scene. Leaving the European Union is an issue which has pitched the graduates (dare we say, graduate class) against the non-graduates, but it is only one of a whole series of issues which expose a similar opposition, because that opposition is structural and runs very deep. Conversely, the anti-elite current in poetry can carry a wide variety of messages, and is not straightforwardly an artistic error. Because the relationship between the highly educated and the bottom 40% is so important, or because modern life is so complicated that only theory can really help modern government, this object: abstract, or Germanic: Latinate, opposition is a stylistic means through which significant messages can be written.
Literature is, to generalise, about shared feelings displayed through symbolism. We have been talking about feelings which are inside the cone of silence, which were not shown in shared symbolism, which were private and to some extent shameful. There is another category, of feelings which were shameful but which are shared, which are the material of an alliance which can affect public life, and which are perhaps the inexplicit content of symbolism or the content of inexplicit symbolism.
There are two results for the attack on the elites. First, a shift of perspective whereby you see a group of culturally expert people as carrying out a function, not just being natural and seeking pleasure but as enthralled to other people and providing services to them which can be criticised like other commodities. People would not necessarily agree what these services do or should consist of. Secondly, the ebb and flow of political power. The investment of the elite is not secure. The elite as promoters may be faced with the refusal of the public to consume what they offer, or with surges where certain poets become unexpectedly popular. Commodities can fail in the market, and the retail arena is the decisive area. When waves of resentment billow up, from feminists, ethnic minorities, Marxists, outsiders, and so on, the ship changes course, and this is of great interest to participants.
As I write, the Brexit issue is tearing the country apart and even tearing both major political parties apart. Nobody really enjoys this level of division. The point of an education that makes you look at ideas is that thereafter ideas don’t become rigid and you don’t let them evolve into rigid political divisions. I find it incredible that any stylistic or cultural oppositions in poetry could be permanent, or that everything could rotate around them. In everyday speech, we use a mixture of Saxon, French, and Latin words all the time. Poetry is about shared feelings; its linguistic fabric is made up of moving semantic oppositions, but it is not an investment in permanent social oppositions.
Tuesday, 27 November 2018
Ken Smith and cold hard facts
Further thoughts about Ken Smith
(addition amplifying part of "Affluence")
I attended a talk by John Goodby (9 November 2018) in which he brought up three aspects of Smith: the frequency of the word “stone”, the problem of masculinity, and the hesitancy or indeterminacy In his work. This was at a “celebration” (or book launch?), in Leeds, where several of the people I spoke to didn’t seem convinced of the merits of Smith.
The next day, I looked at The Poet Reclining (the 1989 Selected) and counted 100 uses of the word “stone” (or variants, e.g. “stony”) in the first 120 pages. This does seem like a serious problem, and we have to address it.
Smith’s first book was called “The Pity” and has a poem called by the same name which describes someone being made to watch while the Kuomintang political police garotte his wife. (This was Mao Tse-Tung, and his first wife.) As he watches he feels the pity drain out of him: “instead of blood I watched and saw the pity run out of me”. This is a central poem, and what we see as the story of The Poet Reclining is that the heart which has had all the pity squeezed out of it becomes a stone, and all the stones in the poems come from this original loss of pity. Mao told this story as part of a positive development process, a step towards political wisdom. We have to ask whether the stone is a heroic state, and attractive, or a barren substance, the deposit of pain and endurance. This is also the question of whether Smith’s poetry, with its simple and repetitive language, is attractive or bleak. The stone is both the thing which Smith hates for its cruelty and the thing he most identifies with, and sees as most authentic. Porter Wagoner sang a country and western song about "(Who taught who) the Cold Hard Facts of Life", and the stones, obviously, are these "cold hard facts of life". Is feeling cold and hard actually a feeling?
Towards the end of the volume is a poem, 'Fox in October', about the character Fox – detached from the main bulk of Fox Running (a 1980 long poem held to be Smith’s major work). It is about 80 lines long and includes the phrase “He forgave” 20 times. The problem isn’t just about re-using the same image, it is about direct verbal repetition – and this is a consequence of a neglect of the power of syntax, a shunning of the devices of language that relate things to each other, qualify them, find a pattern in them and conduct an argument. This connects to a wider subject of the use of parataxis, which affects a number of Seventies poets and deserves extended study. In Smith’s case, it represents a dislike of abstraction.
If you consider that hills are made of stone, the stones represent hills and upland ground. In England, this is mainly found in the North. The stones are a symbol of the North (and a negative of the “softness” of the South, home of alluvial lowlands and of literate culture). In Anglo-Saxon, many names include the element “stan”, or stone. They are all male names. Stone is a male substance, and a symbol of people seen as harder, stronger. They have rugged faces, with bones larger and more prominent, big jaws, and gravelly voices.
I don’t want to get into the topic of indeterminacy. Robert Sheppard has published extensively on this, it was the subject of his doctoral thesis so he has been working on it for thirty years or more. His books on the subject cover a lot of ground and are basic to the understanding of modern British poetry. I just want to observe, first, that you can be indeterminate and still not be writing good poetry. Robert has so much interest in it that he has re-defined it as the goal of style, instead of being just a feature. Secondly, that it is decisive for Smith. When he writes about masculinity, the hesitation and uncertainty in his poems remove the possible thesis of an aggressive masculinity. Rather, his appeal is inseparable from masculine features like courage, terseness, even ruggedness, but he has withdrawn from the hero figure so common at mid-century and is even casting doubt upon that figure. Heroic figures inevitably win victories – they excel their opponents. Hughes’ voracious beast-figures constantly destroy other creatures, the weaker ones. Smith’s heroes never win.
Is using the same word 100 times repetitive? Of course. And this repetitive solution is a symptom of preceding decisions which blocked development and constrained a repetitive question and a repetitive answer. Smith has resort to myths which produce even simpler verbal contexts.
The jacket of Reclining quotes Charles Boyle saying “many (of the poems) have the harsh simplicity of Anglo-Saxon or other oral verse.” To get with this, we have to get with a formation of taste. I mean by that a coherent group of people for whom certain public statements hold true, which holds assets which rise or sinks in value with the passage of time, which seeks a certain kind of poetry and encourages poets to write it. A review of a 1960 book by John Holloway says “The poems display a sensuousness, a feeling for tangs, hardnesses, distances, for the muscularity of nature.” The cover of the 2018 Smith Collected also says the poems are “muscular”. This formation shares, roughly, a belief in terseness and gruffness as masculinity and authenticity. Writing in stone is especially good because of its rigidity and, if vertical, erectness. Anglo-Saxon style features are admired because they are irreducible, terse, and, obviously, highly masculine. I suppose that in the 1960s reviewers explained what they wanted and poets tried to give it to them. The end of the age of ideology left reviewers clamouring for poetry about objects and physical work. A point of cliché-fixing might be the section of Briggflatts (1966), where the poet says, rather sententiously, that his message must be carved in stone because anything else is too soft. This equates poetic significance with stoniness. Descriptions of objects are admired and either introspection or abstraction are seen as anti-poetic: language has to stay with the concrete even if human beings flourish in feelings and ideas. This formation includes an admiration for the working class, seen as authentic because its members deal with objects and physical problems demanding strength. They take part in struggles. (This version has a male-only working class and they work only in demanding physical jobs.) Their distaste for abstraction correlates with a lack of abstract values like wealth, and of cultural capital. This line flourished in Stand, which Smith co-edited in the Sixties, and in the North. It flourished, from 1979, in publications (and jacket texts) from Bloodaxe Books, whose founder seems to have been much stimulated by Smith (their first book was his Tristan Crazy). It took on Bunting as an anti-abstract poet but rejected everything else about modernism. Later, it took on Smith and Pickard but rejected all the rest of the New Thing of the Sixties and Seventies, as brilliantly located and defined by Mottram. In fact, it discarded Mottram’s message as a whole.
This version of terseness could evolve into dumbing-down. That is the way you end up going when you discard ideas (as middle-class nonsense, or whatever). I think that some ideas have arrived since Anglo-Saxon times. In linguistics, a word is correct because a speech community accepts it as such, and in poetry we have to accept the power to legislate of social formations, small communities. The “objects are more authentic than ideas” party have had their successes, over the past fifty years. The cover of the 2018 Collected says that Smith inspired “an entire generation”; I am uneasy about this, and not only because Smith’s ideals are generic. This line wasn't exactly new in 1966, with Briggflatts, and it hadn't got any newer by 1975. It was not equipped to become the new poetry of the 1980s.
The ordeal is a significant image for Smith. Mao’s political education through torture is just the most striking version. Obviously, the more like a stone you are, the more you can bear an ordeal. Fox Running is effectively the tale of an ordeal – in this case torture by sensory deprivation and cognitive dissonance (“gaslighting”) rather than physical pain. Quite probably, the poet sees the workers and peasants as the most meritorious people, because they have suffered the most and so acquired the most merit. I say probably – but as the poems do not tolerate abstractions they don’t really tell you. It just feels like he sees history as an ordeal.
The really difficult thing to explain about Smith is how people enjoy his work when it is so repetitive and underdeveloped. I can point to folk music (including blues). Folksong is also repetitive, stylised, and without introspection. And we do like it. But these options limit the possibilities for development. This is where Fox Running happens – a breakout into a more complex form which could not be sustained without taking the linguistic fabric apart and modernising it.
Smith’s characters rarely seem to have any influence over their own destiny. This accounts for the lack of dialogue and reasoning in his poems – that kind of behaviour is just irrelevant, it doesn’t influence anything. We have to speak of a sociological group who are so gripped by poverty that they do not take part in the political process, and this is why they see the world as made of stones, unable to be influenced. Smith gives a voice to people who don't vote and don't read a serious newspaper because they feel that change would not affect them and politics will always leave them behind. This is what gives his work authenticity: genuine poverty and genuine endurance. You can read his poems while having left-wing feelings, but the poems are terrifyingly apolitical, they don't believe that things have causes or that reason will explain why. They echo a world of people who do not have political hopes, and whose wealth is negligible. The readers of poetry are not within this world, but they respect its voice. That voice is organically expressed in folksong, which does not believe in causality but only in fate, not in human reason but only in grief and joy. Smith’s poems have some of the appeal of country and western, where the dullness of the language expresses the low status of the players and the authenticity of their testimony. All his objects are inexpensive ones. We can answer the question now – once you have piled up assets like {gruff, authentic, Northern, hills, Anglo-Saxon, hard, rugged, physical, working class} a significant fraction of the audience have already surrendered.
I thought to look at a poem by John Holloway, in pursuit of the fan-base of the word “muscular”. Here is one from his 1965 volume, Wood and Windfall. It is about stonecutting:
The severe sense: face
Without message, rebuffing from inward. Once
For an hour I watched the master mason lettering.
And the blade at its dry rising,
Coming out in a puff
As he butted the haft with a birdswing lightness
But a birdswing boldness. The feather and chip of the script
Flowing in a flutter: variety, gaiety,
A trickle of flowers down the stone in
Brightness, a lightness…
Severity
Made also this garden [.]
(”Severity”)
The last two lines are a bit obvious:
A spare, linear, elegance: message from
The chisel.
Sounds like that stone-cutting brag in Briggflatts, doesn’t it? But as it was published the year before ‘Briggflatts’ this is not influence – it’s just the kind of thing reviewers were asking for, in 1965. My impression is that Holloway was a much better writer than Smith, that his poem creates a series of unique moments through words modulating each other and Smith grimly repeats the same moment. As for sensuous – Holloway’s poem is sensuous and Smith’s aren’t. He never has a voluptuous attitude towards sensation: his poems are de-aestheticised. In a sense, they aren’t poems. But Smith has that authenticity, gruffness, bleakness. People like his poems and apparently don’t notice the repetitions.
Smith's interviews disclose events in 'Fox' which just aren't there in the poem – out of his linguistic reach. I feel that the weakness of Fox is in expressing ideas – Smith is so keen to reduce things to images that much of the plot is unclear. The images lack definition. The main character cannot articulate his feelings. The lack of definition makes it hard to say anything conclusive about the poetry but also makes it hard to find bottom when you are in the middle of the poem. In fact that is one of the core sensations when reading Smith: underdefinition. The only source of information on the situation wasn’t very communicative. Even at the end, you haven’t got very much. But as we saw, there is a poetic sympathy group which wants to define this inconclusive result as a victory. It is like a film with no soundtrack: it turns out that the range of clear visual equivalents for feelings is limited, and people do better expressing their feelings through words. We are used to being told that stupid poetry is good because it embodies femininity. About 90 times a week, actually. But here it looks as if we are being asked to ignore the artistic weaknesses of some work because the writer, via gruffness and rigidity, etc., is linked to masculinity. The masculinity is not explicit but we can’t explain the popularity of the poetry without it. What makes Smith work is a sense of doubt about being gruff and macho. What holds him down is the unwillingness to talk about ideas or feelings.
I mentioned that 'Fox in October', which should be the climax of the work, repeats the phrase "He forgave" 20 times. What is he forgiving? the main poem does not describe Fox as being resentful or say why he was angry with these 20 people or groups of people. Smith's grip on language wasn't flexible enough to let him establish that information. So the forgiveness is puzzling and underdefined. The repetition is a sign that the poet's verbal powers are inadequate. Actually, 'Fox' took him to his limits, and even if quite a lot of it was beyond his powers it is a vital poem because he had gone to that site of overstretch.
John also spoke about the influence of “deep image” poetry in Smith, and an essay by Robert Bly was cited (by another speaker at the event) as being annotated by Smith, as a statement he valued. Evidently, the reliance on images, such as stones, is typical of folk-songs. Such songs notably lack abstractions or introspective statements, they prefer symbolic images. Smith’s use of legends in poems can be seen as an extension of this folk-song style. The poems about heroic Amerindian figures (“The Sioux cleared from Minnesota”, etc.) are notable for using simple and primal images, and lacking sociological detail. The poet has very few concepts in common with the subjects, so concepts are thrown out. What remains is simple if emotive. It also resembles the writing in numerous Fifties Westerns in which Indians are major characters, so Broken Arrow, Taza Son of Cochise, etc.
The blurb for the new Collected advises us "Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets." It does not say which generation this was, and the phrase might actually mean "inspired Neil Astley". Astley founded Bloodaxe Books and their debut with Smith's Tristan Crazy was an important moment. I feel that Smith’s example has been used to cover up a line of weak poetry, where abstraction is chopped out as unpoetic and every situation is simple. He may even have helped to get this poetry going – as an editor of Stand in the 60s and as an adviser to Neil Astley. Of course Bloodaxe located a market for the style which they isolated, they made that market happy, but of course this style deserves to be critiqued, like other ideas, as a proposition about what poetry is. You can write poems which exclude abstractions, but you can't define the poetic as "that which is without abstractions" and you can't define modernity as "the exclusion of abstractions". There is an “interest group” which is simply wrong about how poetry works and where it should go. In about 1973, there was a whole world of advanced poetry in Britain, and Smith was wrong to overlook most of it and just go for the poets who were afraid of abstraction. This approach is still wrong. In Smith’s poetry, it is throughout possible to read the simple style as damage: the groan of a heart which has had the pity squeezed out of it. I do not believe someone telling me that this music of damage is what we want, what makes us happy, the destination we should be travelling towards.
As an aside, I think John and I agreed that Ranter is an imitation of Fox Running, which is what Neil Astley felt when Ranter was submitted to him. What convinced me was the stuff about radio. There is a page about shortwave radio in Fox. There is mention, at three points in Ranter, of characters communicating by radio – a completely unexpected event since they are all in the Middle Ages. It is logical for Fox to have insomnia, since his days are unused; and in the Seventies normal radio switched off at midnight, so that insomniacs used the shortwave (VHF) to pick up broadcasts to fill the night. He listens to Radio Moscow and the American Forces Network. In the added poem, ‘Fox in October’, we hear “his ear to the radio noise/ out at the last edge of the little we know,/ in the dark of the planetarium". Radio waves run through your house without really having any connection to you. Radio telescopes pick up "noise" at the edge of the detectible, Fox is leading a life without picking up meaningful signals, where his brain is losing pattern. The whole of Fox Running is about disconnection. The indifference of cosmic, interplanetary noise to humans is the final extension of Fox’s inability to connect with London, to find a job, friends, or a home. The radio imagery is much more deeply and structurally embedded in Fox than in Ranter, and therefore looks like an undigested and unnecessary stray, or intrusion, in the latter poem. Incidentally, David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts (1955) also has someone listening to VHF broadcasts in the middle of the night. It was just part of insomnia. Like Fox, he is afraid of nuclear war. Smith adds the detail about ambiguous noise picked up by a defence detection network as possibly starting a world war.
(addition amplifying part of "Affluence")
I attended a talk by John Goodby (9 November 2018) in which he brought up three aspects of Smith: the frequency of the word “stone”, the problem of masculinity, and the hesitancy or indeterminacy In his work. This was at a “celebration” (or book launch?), in Leeds, where several of the people I spoke to didn’t seem convinced of the merits of Smith.
The next day, I looked at The Poet Reclining (the 1989 Selected) and counted 100 uses of the word “stone” (or variants, e.g. “stony”) in the first 120 pages. This does seem like a serious problem, and we have to address it.
Smith’s first book was called “The Pity” and has a poem called by the same name which describes someone being made to watch while the Kuomintang political police garotte his wife. (This was Mao Tse-Tung, and his first wife.) As he watches he feels the pity drain out of him: “instead of blood I watched and saw the pity run out of me”. This is a central poem, and what we see as the story of The Poet Reclining is that the heart which has had all the pity squeezed out of it becomes a stone, and all the stones in the poems come from this original loss of pity. Mao told this story as part of a positive development process, a step towards political wisdom. We have to ask whether the stone is a heroic state, and attractive, or a barren substance, the deposit of pain and endurance. This is also the question of whether Smith’s poetry, with its simple and repetitive language, is attractive or bleak. The stone is both the thing which Smith hates for its cruelty and the thing he most identifies with, and sees as most authentic. Porter Wagoner sang a country and western song about "(Who taught who) the Cold Hard Facts of Life", and the stones, obviously, are these "cold hard facts of life". Is feeling cold and hard actually a feeling?
Towards the end of the volume is a poem, 'Fox in October', about the character Fox – detached from the main bulk of Fox Running (a 1980 long poem held to be Smith’s major work). It is about 80 lines long and includes the phrase “He forgave” 20 times. The problem isn’t just about re-using the same image, it is about direct verbal repetition – and this is a consequence of a neglect of the power of syntax, a shunning of the devices of language that relate things to each other, qualify them, find a pattern in them and conduct an argument. This connects to a wider subject of the use of parataxis, which affects a number of Seventies poets and deserves extended study. In Smith’s case, it represents a dislike of abstraction.
If you consider that hills are made of stone, the stones represent hills and upland ground. In England, this is mainly found in the North. The stones are a symbol of the North (and a negative of the “softness” of the South, home of alluvial lowlands and of literate culture). In Anglo-Saxon, many names include the element “stan”, or stone. They are all male names. Stone is a male substance, and a symbol of people seen as harder, stronger. They have rugged faces, with bones larger and more prominent, big jaws, and gravelly voices.
I don’t want to get into the topic of indeterminacy. Robert Sheppard has published extensively on this, it was the subject of his doctoral thesis so he has been working on it for thirty years or more. His books on the subject cover a lot of ground and are basic to the understanding of modern British poetry. I just want to observe, first, that you can be indeterminate and still not be writing good poetry. Robert has so much interest in it that he has re-defined it as the goal of style, instead of being just a feature. Secondly, that it is decisive for Smith. When he writes about masculinity, the hesitation and uncertainty in his poems remove the possible thesis of an aggressive masculinity. Rather, his appeal is inseparable from masculine features like courage, terseness, even ruggedness, but he has withdrawn from the hero figure so common at mid-century and is even casting doubt upon that figure. Heroic figures inevitably win victories – they excel their opponents. Hughes’ voracious beast-figures constantly destroy other creatures, the weaker ones. Smith’s heroes never win.
Is using the same word 100 times repetitive? Of course. And this repetitive solution is a symptom of preceding decisions which blocked development and constrained a repetitive question and a repetitive answer. Smith has resort to myths which produce even simpler verbal contexts.
The jacket of Reclining quotes Charles Boyle saying “many (of the poems) have the harsh simplicity of Anglo-Saxon or other oral verse.” To get with this, we have to get with a formation of taste. I mean by that a coherent group of people for whom certain public statements hold true, which holds assets which rise or sinks in value with the passage of time, which seeks a certain kind of poetry and encourages poets to write it. A review of a 1960 book by John Holloway says “The poems display a sensuousness, a feeling for tangs, hardnesses, distances, for the muscularity of nature.” The cover of the 2018 Smith Collected also says the poems are “muscular”. This formation shares, roughly, a belief in terseness and gruffness as masculinity and authenticity. Writing in stone is especially good because of its rigidity and, if vertical, erectness. Anglo-Saxon style features are admired because they are irreducible, terse, and, obviously, highly masculine. I suppose that in the 1960s reviewers explained what they wanted and poets tried to give it to them. The end of the age of ideology left reviewers clamouring for poetry about objects and physical work. A point of cliché-fixing might be the section of Briggflatts (1966), where the poet says, rather sententiously, that his message must be carved in stone because anything else is too soft. This equates poetic significance with stoniness. Descriptions of objects are admired and either introspection or abstraction are seen as anti-poetic: language has to stay with the concrete even if human beings flourish in feelings and ideas. This formation includes an admiration for the working class, seen as authentic because its members deal with objects and physical problems demanding strength. They take part in struggles. (This version has a male-only working class and they work only in demanding physical jobs.) Their distaste for abstraction correlates with a lack of abstract values like wealth, and of cultural capital. This line flourished in Stand, which Smith co-edited in the Sixties, and in the North. It flourished, from 1979, in publications (and jacket texts) from Bloodaxe Books, whose founder seems to have been much stimulated by Smith (their first book was his Tristan Crazy). It took on Bunting as an anti-abstract poet but rejected everything else about modernism. Later, it took on Smith and Pickard but rejected all the rest of the New Thing of the Sixties and Seventies, as brilliantly located and defined by Mottram. In fact, it discarded Mottram’s message as a whole.
This version of terseness could evolve into dumbing-down. That is the way you end up going when you discard ideas (as middle-class nonsense, or whatever). I think that some ideas have arrived since Anglo-Saxon times. In linguistics, a word is correct because a speech community accepts it as such, and in poetry we have to accept the power to legislate of social formations, small communities. The “objects are more authentic than ideas” party have had their successes, over the past fifty years. The cover of the 2018 Collected says that Smith inspired “an entire generation”; I am uneasy about this, and not only because Smith’s ideals are generic. This line wasn't exactly new in 1966, with Briggflatts, and it hadn't got any newer by 1975. It was not equipped to become the new poetry of the 1980s.
The ordeal is a significant image for Smith. Mao’s political education through torture is just the most striking version. Obviously, the more like a stone you are, the more you can bear an ordeal. Fox Running is effectively the tale of an ordeal – in this case torture by sensory deprivation and cognitive dissonance (“gaslighting”) rather than physical pain. Quite probably, the poet sees the workers and peasants as the most meritorious people, because they have suffered the most and so acquired the most merit. I say probably – but as the poems do not tolerate abstractions they don’t really tell you. It just feels like he sees history as an ordeal.
The really difficult thing to explain about Smith is how people enjoy his work when it is so repetitive and underdeveloped. I can point to folk music (including blues). Folksong is also repetitive, stylised, and without introspection. And we do like it. But these options limit the possibilities for development. This is where Fox Running happens – a breakout into a more complex form which could not be sustained without taking the linguistic fabric apart and modernising it.
Smith’s characters rarely seem to have any influence over their own destiny. This accounts for the lack of dialogue and reasoning in his poems – that kind of behaviour is just irrelevant, it doesn’t influence anything. We have to speak of a sociological group who are so gripped by poverty that they do not take part in the political process, and this is why they see the world as made of stones, unable to be influenced. Smith gives a voice to people who don't vote and don't read a serious newspaper because they feel that change would not affect them and politics will always leave them behind. This is what gives his work authenticity: genuine poverty and genuine endurance. You can read his poems while having left-wing feelings, but the poems are terrifyingly apolitical, they don't believe that things have causes or that reason will explain why. They echo a world of people who do not have political hopes, and whose wealth is negligible. The readers of poetry are not within this world, but they respect its voice. That voice is organically expressed in folksong, which does not believe in causality but only in fate, not in human reason but only in grief and joy. Smith’s poems have some of the appeal of country and western, where the dullness of the language expresses the low status of the players and the authenticity of their testimony. All his objects are inexpensive ones. We can answer the question now – once you have piled up assets like {gruff, authentic, Northern, hills, Anglo-Saxon, hard, rugged, physical, working class} a significant fraction of the audience have already surrendered.
I thought to look at a poem by John Holloway, in pursuit of the fan-base of the word “muscular”. Here is one from his 1965 volume, Wood and Windfall. It is about stonecutting:
The severe sense: face
Without message, rebuffing from inward. Once
For an hour I watched the master mason lettering.
And the blade at its dry rising,
Coming out in a puff
As he butted the haft with a birdswing lightness
But a birdswing boldness. The feather and chip of the script
Flowing in a flutter: variety, gaiety,
A trickle of flowers down the stone in
Brightness, a lightness…
Severity
Made also this garden [.]
(”Severity”)
The last two lines are a bit obvious:
A spare, linear, elegance: message from
The chisel.
Sounds like that stone-cutting brag in Briggflatts, doesn’t it? But as it was published the year before ‘Briggflatts’ this is not influence – it’s just the kind of thing reviewers were asking for, in 1965. My impression is that Holloway was a much better writer than Smith, that his poem creates a series of unique moments through words modulating each other and Smith grimly repeats the same moment. As for sensuous – Holloway’s poem is sensuous and Smith’s aren’t. He never has a voluptuous attitude towards sensation: his poems are de-aestheticised. In a sense, they aren’t poems. But Smith has that authenticity, gruffness, bleakness. People like his poems and apparently don’t notice the repetitions.
Smith's interviews disclose events in 'Fox' which just aren't there in the poem – out of his linguistic reach. I feel that the weakness of Fox is in expressing ideas – Smith is so keen to reduce things to images that much of the plot is unclear. The images lack definition. The main character cannot articulate his feelings. The lack of definition makes it hard to say anything conclusive about the poetry but also makes it hard to find bottom when you are in the middle of the poem. In fact that is one of the core sensations when reading Smith: underdefinition. The only source of information on the situation wasn’t very communicative. Even at the end, you haven’t got very much. But as we saw, there is a poetic sympathy group which wants to define this inconclusive result as a victory. It is like a film with no soundtrack: it turns out that the range of clear visual equivalents for feelings is limited, and people do better expressing their feelings through words. We are used to being told that stupid poetry is good because it embodies femininity. About 90 times a week, actually. But here it looks as if we are being asked to ignore the artistic weaknesses of some work because the writer, via gruffness and rigidity, etc., is linked to masculinity. The masculinity is not explicit but we can’t explain the popularity of the poetry without it. What makes Smith work is a sense of doubt about being gruff and macho. What holds him down is the unwillingness to talk about ideas or feelings.
I mentioned that 'Fox in October', which should be the climax of the work, repeats the phrase "He forgave" 20 times. What is he forgiving? the main poem does not describe Fox as being resentful or say why he was angry with these 20 people or groups of people. Smith's grip on language wasn't flexible enough to let him establish that information. So the forgiveness is puzzling and underdefined. The repetition is a sign that the poet's verbal powers are inadequate. Actually, 'Fox' took him to his limits, and even if quite a lot of it was beyond his powers it is a vital poem because he had gone to that site of overstretch.
John also spoke about the influence of “deep image” poetry in Smith, and an essay by Robert Bly was cited (by another speaker at the event) as being annotated by Smith, as a statement he valued. Evidently, the reliance on images, such as stones, is typical of folk-songs. Such songs notably lack abstractions or introspective statements, they prefer symbolic images. Smith’s use of legends in poems can be seen as an extension of this folk-song style. The poems about heroic Amerindian figures (“The Sioux cleared from Minnesota”, etc.) are notable for using simple and primal images, and lacking sociological detail. The poet has very few concepts in common with the subjects, so concepts are thrown out. What remains is simple if emotive. It also resembles the writing in numerous Fifties Westerns in which Indians are major characters, so Broken Arrow, Taza Son of Cochise, etc.
The blurb for the new Collected advises us "Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets." It does not say which generation this was, and the phrase might actually mean "inspired Neil Astley". Astley founded Bloodaxe Books and their debut with Smith's Tristan Crazy was an important moment. I feel that Smith’s example has been used to cover up a line of weak poetry, where abstraction is chopped out as unpoetic and every situation is simple. He may even have helped to get this poetry going – as an editor of Stand in the 60s and as an adviser to Neil Astley. Of course Bloodaxe located a market for the style which they isolated, they made that market happy, but of course this style deserves to be critiqued, like other ideas, as a proposition about what poetry is. You can write poems which exclude abstractions, but you can't define the poetic as "that which is without abstractions" and you can't define modernity as "the exclusion of abstractions". There is an “interest group” which is simply wrong about how poetry works and where it should go. In about 1973, there was a whole world of advanced poetry in Britain, and Smith was wrong to overlook most of it and just go for the poets who were afraid of abstraction. This approach is still wrong. In Smith’s poetry, it is throughout possible to read the simple style as damage: the groan of a heart which has had the pity squeezed out of it. I do not believe someone telling me that this music of damage is what we want, what makes us happy, the destination we should be travelling towards.
As an aside, I think John and I agreed that Ranter is an imitation of Fox Running, which is what Neil Astley felt when Ranter was submitted to him. What convinced me was the stuff about radio. There is a page about shortwave radio in Fox. There is mention, at three points in Ranter, of characters communicating by radio – a completely unexpected event since they are all in the Middle Ages. It is logical for Fox to have insomnia, since his days are unused; and in the Seventies normal radio switched off at midnight, so that insomniacs used the shortwave (VHF) to pick up broadcasts to fill the night. He listens to Radio Moscow and the American Forces Network. In the added poem, ‘Fox in October’, we hear “his ear to the radio noise/ out at the last edge of the little we know,/ in the dark of the planetarium". Radio waves run through your house without really having any connection to you. Radio telescopes pick up "noise" at the edge of the detectible, Fox is leading a life without picking up meaningful signals, where his brain is losing pattern. The whole of Fox Running is about disconnection. The indifference of cosmic, interplanetary noise to humans is the final extension of Fox’s inability to connect with London, to find a job, friends, or a home. The radio imagery is much more deeply and structurally embedded in Fox than in Ranter, and therefore looks like an undigested and unnecessary stray, or intrusion, in the latter poem. Incidentally, David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts (1955) also has someone listening to VHF broadcasts in the middle of the night. It was just part of insomnia. Like Fox, he is afraid of nuclear war. Smith adds the detail about ambiguous noise picked up by a defence detection network as possibly starting a world war.
Addendum. I got hold of the 2019 Smith Collected (having declined to
buy it at the launch) and read the 370 pages which aren’t in The
Poet Reclining. My feeling (and this goes back 20 years, roughly)
was that his initial stylistic decisions had left him limited room
for deployment, and that later books would just represent iterations
of the well-worn process. This is basically what we find, but there
are some moments when Smith outruns his own inured habits and
produces something memorable. One is a group of Italian poems (at pp.
424 to 426) where the landscape stops being dull and menacing and
covered in wreckage, as in most Smith poems, and becomes somewhere
pleasant – agreeable – where testing and evaluating sensation
becomes interesting. So he gives up being Ken Smith and it’s very
jolly. The other is a group at pages 462, 476, and 511 where he
writes scholarly poems, based on reference books. These are about
chickens, hats, and the Romance word for “goat”, respectively.
The one about hats starts with a dedication to “JHW”, and it is
reasonable to think that this refers to John Hartley Williams and
that these three poems are “guest appearances” where Smith copies
Williams’ style and produces something distinctively different from
his run of the mill yarns. There is an issue with injecting this
style; Smith’s run of the mill poem relies on saying “nothing
ever changes” and “you like my poem because it never changes”,
but the Williams poem-idea involves saying “everything changes all
the time” and “consciousness is too archaic and slow to deal with
the real, shimmering complexity of the universe” and “our brains
can’t recount the complexity of the minute that has just passed”.
So pursuing this line would undermine Smith’s stock in trade. The
willed pessimism and rigidity of his characters start to look like a
habit of mind, a block on needed perceptions, rather than a searing
insight into anything outside the protagonist’s mind. I wish Smith
had explored this idea further – written a “post-modernist”
work. He is not in the premier league of poets writing about byways
of learning, how great learning demolishes generalisations (and rigid
psychological stances based on them). Fox Running (with 'Fox in October') represent his moment of maximum ambition and experiment.
His poems set in
other countries don’t work very well because he always sounds the
same and it is like a character actor who plays the same role in 100
films, irrespective of whether they are taking place in Detroit,
Morocco, Bucharest, etc. So an expansion of scope, linked to trips to
Croatia, east Germany, Portugal, etc., does not take place. With the
former Warsaw Pact countries, it is a known feature of their history
that they were formerly dictatorships and that the dictatorships
collapsed around 1990 or 1991. The new scene was at least partly
filled with new parties, voting processes, and a new civic activism
by eager citizens. Smith totally fails to register this. He never
even refers to it. So the question is, what does he register. The
imperatives of the basic Smith poem involve exclusion from power,
weariness, numbness, dull rage. This pattern is too stable to allow
him to register the return of democracy and the disappearance of a
world of secret policemen and literary hacks. It arouses the
reflection that achieving stability might be more basic, in an early
organism, than detecting change in the outside world. This raises
another question. Someone said, at the Collected launch, that Smith
had little time for any of the “British Poetry Revival” poets
except Pickard and Jeff Nuttall. Leaving out the other 43, that is. And
someone said that, late in his life, he had little belief in
left-wing politics. This connects with the pessimism of his poems –
his characters are unable to imagine change. There is little in his
poems about politics – it is as if an almost total distrust of
abstractions included the ideas that affect legislation and public
affairs. So the gap between Smith and the other poets favoured by
Mottram, back in the Seventies, was that Smith did not want to
imagine a different way of ordering society or a different way of
organising language. Smith had the stoicism to endure failure but not
the susceptibility to imagine or bring about success. He certainly
disliked authority, but that is not the same as resisting it. (This
information may not be wholly accurate or deal with changes of
attitude.)
There is a very good
poem at p.472 called ‘Interrogating the egg-timer’, where the
narrator is a glass egg-timer and the development is genuinely
surrealist and unpredictable.
I think it is a
mistake to read the whole collected poems in a block. They are too
repetitive, the limits imposed by Smith’s initial postulates or
unquestioned, structural, rules are too obvious and too restrictive.
But his persistence connects with the basic strength of the gestalt,
the song he endlessly hears. There is a kind of comfort in the
predictability – you don't have to concentrate, after a while, to
get the meaning, because you already know what it is going to be.
Like folk-song, his poems benefit in compression from this
narrowness, almost sterility, of formal variation.
Sunday, 19 March 2017
Refuge areas and English nationalism
Refuge
areas and English nationalism
This
is a posting about resentment and refuge areas, in the wake of the EU
referendum and the election of Donald Trump.
The
poetry world is most visible when it carries out acts of validation,
such as awarding prizes and releasing books in prestige series. These
acts are claims of homogeneity and indeed poets all want homogeneous
applause. However, a significant component of the scene viewed in the
round is resentment. This is one of the major energy flows and it
needs to be brought to light.
One
form of the lingering resentment is ethnically defined. It's aboot
time we listened tae naebodie but
oorsels. TS Law said. Mentioning this raises the possibility of
an English Nationalist programme for poetry. This seems structurally
implied in a game where ethnically defined blocs are saying listen to
naebodie but oorsels, but it remains a white space on the board. It
faces structural difficulties- on the level of someone saying that
they won't eat spaghetti or hamburger because they aren’t English.
In parallel, it seems that someone who would commit to such a
programme would reject all poetry since 1960. That is, this category
of people may actually exist, in numbers, but they are structurally
removed from the game because they refuse to play it. This would
point to the origin of the poetry scene as a self-selected group,
dominated by empathy which leads to convergence. The more they
converge, through shared experiences, the more they differ from the
outside world. We may speculate that even though poetry is
subjective, if a number of people read the same 300 books they
converge, so that their subjective reactions come to resemble each
other. In fact, the wish of the poet was to communicate, and this
always mitigated the purely subjective element. The domination of the
poetry world by the people who actually want to take part in it
disguises an untested fact, namely that the scene could alternatively
be run by quite different groups who would then lead it down a new
path – so that the empathetic/liberal tendency would have to leave.
So perhaps very different outcomes were possible.
English
nationalism would take the form of denying the right of the people in
the poetry world to own poetry. This is a thought experiment. It is
likely that the actual state of poetry is the product of all its
preceding states. Nationalism was extremely important in poetry in
the era of Newbolt and Noyes, but there was a strong reaction against
it in the Twenties – the reaction against the military ideas of the
First World War, in fact. Being incorporated into the poetry world
has meant, since that point, taking on unstated assumptions (about the
desirability of war, the condition of the State as an emotional
object rather than a business one, about asking questions, and about
submerging in a collective), which were not compatible with
nationalism.
One
fruit of the uprising of 1968 has certainly been to critique
individual judgement, the individual experience of art as a source of
knowledge and pleasure. I think there is a refuge idea where art
consumers faced with the critique of judgement which has continued to take place get irritated and disengage and take refuge
in a narrower world. Here, the refusal to extend is a vision of
authenticity. They find a comfort zone of pleasure while ignoring the
critique and the rather long-drawn-out arguments which have
accompanied it. This seems like a retreat to me. Back into the Balkan
hill ranges and a tribal sense of homogeneity. I am not sure that
criticism ought to be annoying and humiliating. There is a whole line
of Marxist-oriented cultural critique which is designed to humiliate
people – in the style of John Berger. Your experience is invalid,
he is saying, because you are invalid people. This may not be backed
up by evidence.
I
was very impressed with Goodwin and Ford's book about the rise of
UKIP (Revolt on the Right), because at each point they pass on
assailing UKIP's dud ideas in favour of saying that the energy of the
system as a whole is running down because politicians are ignoring
what the electorate are thinking about and saying. The key thing is
the decline of Labour and the Conservatives, not the rise of UKIP
which wins votes without winning elections. I think the managers of
poetry need to learn from populist hostility.
The
poetic equivalent of UKIP and Donald Trump is Bloodaxe Books. The
critique of the intelligentsia. Of sophistication, of ideas of
modernity. The resentment against an elite who dominate the discourse
and are super-articulate, the rationalisation that the elite represent a
consensus and are fastened by self-regard. We have been dealing with
this since the end of the 70s. Actually Bloodaxe is not English
nationalist. I should emphasise that this resentment is expressed in
the jacket texts, a fugitive genre which is not subject to scrutiny
and not expected to be responsible and proportionate. Its texts may
not be visible in retrospect, they vanish. They are anonymous. But
they are read a lot by possible shoppers. This matches up with
political campaigns via Twitter and the Internet, the digital
post-truth realm. This attitude is not written up in any book (a book
about modern poetry by the head of Bloodaxe was announced in the
Bloodaxe catalogue but never appeared). The
introduction to 'Poetry with an Edge' is a clear moment when the
attack on the elite is set out in cold print. Astley is writing off
the legacy of erudite English poetry. He does not mention the
alternative poetry, or the Left attack on Oxford and the 'legacy
elite' - this parallels Farage's dismissal of both Conservative and
Labour without going into the differences between them. Farage
regards these as abstractions, tricks of the elite. Astley regards
the difference between Anthony Thwaite and Eric Mottram as a trick. I
don’t think those jacket texts ever named the people they were
attacking. They didn't distinguish between the academic taste of the
1950s and the modernist/Leftist poets of the 60s and 70s. They just
had a stereotype of “intellectual – smug – inhibited – not
entertaining”. Evidently, many real books acted out that stereotype. By leaving out reasons, Astley assumes emotional solidarity, and offers it. Logic and evidence, or deifinition of terms, are not part of this featureless warmth. Like UKIP, this line of opinion did contain a lesson for the intelligent and credible. I have certainly thought about it a lot. Populist books of poetry were selling in thousands while modernist-style works were selling 200 or 300. 95% of the potential audience are scared of anything difficult.
The
poetry world is a small self-selected group. This is worth thinking
through. Evidently, people who never read any poetry are less
qualified to make generalisations about poetry than people who read
it all the time. This is a question of sovereignty, almost. Of the
right to make judgements. The established “poetry elite” falls
into several groups. Evidently there is a group of managers whose working assets
include the rejection of modernism and of the critique of the self
(roughly) which has developed since 1968. The populist thing involves
a dual rejection: first, of the Oxford line of poetry for being too
narcissistic, too smug, too sheltered from life's problems, too
conservative in social attitudes. Then, quite separately, the
attack on an elite of left-wing intellectuals, for not
delivering credible accounts of lived experience and for being too
esoteric in linguistic means. You can attack both groups at once, especially by pretending that they are the same people. (It
is characteristic of a populist resentment that it ignores
differences between various sectors which it wants to attack.)
Because
of the history of the scene, the populist resentful group is on the
Left and is educated. It is rather that they are less educated than
the hyperliterate, and are Left in a less abstract way than the
readers of philosophy. This is quite unlike the UKIP vs Westminster polemic. You have to have sympathy for someone who is
reeling out of the cinema not having understood the film. People
encountered poetry at school – if there were people who read a
Shakespeare sonnet and really didn't understand it, they were
labelled as not the A-stream by the teachers. Schools have a programme to follow, but it is
unconscionable for the poetry world to go on casting them as the
C-stream. If someone is labelled as 37th out of a field of
45 in an exam, it is quite likely that they will mentally define the
36 who were more intelligent than them as inauthentic and lost in
abstraction. This sounds childish, but as I was saying adult
behaviour in culture recycles attitudes acquired while at school. If
you see attacks on poets with Oxbridge educations, poets with
knowledge of Continental culture, poets who have read literary
theory, we are seeing a “refugium” mentality, parallel to UKIP's
attack on career politicians. You have to admit that some people are
reading new-style poetry and they just don't get it, the dots don't
resolve into a pattern. The scene shouldn’t just be built around
academic stars if they are very few in number.
If
you get into the critique of everyday life, including consciousness,
you can lose the sense of life being lived and offer the reader
nothing to identify with. That is the very thing they want, so giving
it away is quite a radical step. This may be what people mean when
they talk about “abstraction”. I think that what the wider market
wants is a poet with greater sensitivity than most people, and then
poetry which has contained time. If poetry is an argument, if the
compassion of the poet stops being visible because of the critique
they are carrying out, the appeal is not there any more. If you are
criticising the process of consciousness, you end up with zero
contained time. There is nothing to identify with. Meanwhile you can
reach a larger market by presenting a poet who embodies compassion
and the feel of “lived time” even if they are unoriginal and
evidently mediocre at key points.
Obviously
I regard the people who like my poetry as the most legitimate
critics. But there is a circularity built into this. Suppose you have
an elite which enjoys minority support. Meanwhile, its legitimacy is
challenged by broad if disorganised groups which are pushed by
resentment. This means you could redefine them as not being an elite.
As a thought experiment, we could say, let us define a hundred
different factions as being failed elites. How do we decide which one
is the least failed? What I am saying is that if you only have 50
fans there is a problem in you defining those fans as the most
authorised to authorise, because the whole process of legitimation is
in question.
I
don't think the populist hostility amounts to a new elite group. This
is because its means of presenting ideas, in jacket texts and so on,
are so shallow and unaccountable. The ideas cannot be argued at
length because they are too flawed and too reliant on negative
stereotypes which fall into shreds when the evidence is assembled.
They exist as smears, scurrilous insults, stereotypes, folklore, dark
flashes of emotion, and if they were not like that they would not be
populist.
Who
are the elite? One segment little considered is the stockists, the
people who choose the stock of bookshops. They are nameless so their
biographies are not part of the cultural memory. However, it may be
they influence the course of literature more than anyone else. The
flow of reviews and so on may be at a remove from the book trade, and
not especially influential on sales. A critic might be influential by
affecting what the stockists do – influence is always conditional on
being listened to.
I
have reached a halt without talking about refuge areas which ignore
the existence of feminism or of immigrant groups (and critiques of
the British). I think similar conditions apply – the resentment is
never articulated and so is hard to critique intelligently. Similar
emotions are probably in play – people don't want to enter the
poetry section in order to be made to feel guilty and to be told that
the position they hold will have to be given up and they will be
evicted. They probably want to hear the reverse, actually. They may
want a refuge area, a refugium, from those feelings. They are
resentful of an elite which bases its legitimacy on inflicting those
feelings on people. But actually – being pro-feminist and
pro-immigrant really are qualities which qualify you to apply for a
post as culture officer, qualities too which justify the system and
protect it from legitimacy and energy leaking slowly away.
Postscript. There has been a General Election since I wrote this, at which UKIP's share of the vote went down from 12.9% to 1.8%. They look like a burnt-out match. Things are changing very fast in British politics. Does that mean the populist thing can be forgotten? hardly so. The anti-immigration vote has just found other outlets. With poetry, you always have to think about why the huge new educated audience mostly ignore poetry. The people in charge are still short of legitimacy.
Saturday, 7 May 2016
Nothing left alive but a pair of glassy eyes
Nothing
left alive but a pair of glassy eyes: Donald Davie, Under Briggflatts, a
History of British Poetry 1960-88 (Carcanet, 1989)
Objectivity
One wonders
at Davie’s decision to publish a book on a subject which he was resolved to
omit from the text. A historian is someone who consents to write about his
social inferiors; critics aren’t that broad in scope.
Some
figures may illuminate the objections I have. Out of about 20 poets Davie
covers in more than a phrase, four began publishing after 1960. The book could
safely be named “poets of the 1950s: a dogmatic approach.” None of the 85 poets
in the new british poetry 1968-88 is mentioned. (The index reference to
Peter Riley, p.136, translating Mandel’shtam’s octets, is in error for John
Riley.) This emotional trauma extending over poetry and the modern deprives
his work of all value, but does tell a tale; DD really is stricken with panic
and numbness when asked to operate without codified rules. Deverbalisation is
the key event of the book: repressing things from speech indicates high regard
for language, making it (often) the prerogative of authority. Deverbalising is
covert authoritarianism. Poetry is speech: let’s guess that Davie probes poets
for fitness to hold authority, not for artistic pleasure. Every one (possibly)
of those 85 poets is either feminist or homosexual or atheist or wants to
change society.
There is no
rule saying Davie has to write about Allen Fisher. An appeal to “competent
authorities” is no good, because Davie, after all, is a professor. A look at
retail turnover would probably exclude Fisher altogether. Ultimately, there is
no reason for saying Fisher is “an important writer” except my subjective
reactions. I am not an authority, just another peasant. I can’t say Davie is
transgressing where no rules exist. But (what I am getting at) Davie is
solemnly enforcing rules that he has made up. Davie is staking a considerable
sum on his own personal authority; not by chance, authority, in the form of the
Church and the Crown, plays a central role in this book, in which popular
sovereignty is not even mentioned. If you’re going to be authority, you’ve got
to have psychological conviction. It’s painful watching someone afflicted by
two opposing drives (e.g. assertion and concealment), standing or speaking
bizarrely because they are ridden by two incompatible neurological programmes.
Someone will not persuade you that they are well-tempered intelligences if
smoke is coming out of them and bits are falling off as you listen to them.
Surly, slovenly old rascals shouldn’t write books. When lordly fiat fails to
command consent, the rules sustaining authority have to be brought into the
light of day.
Morality;
subjectivity as sin
Both ideas
and emotions can be regarded as disruptive of civil order and of authority.
Davie’s attitude is something like “to be emotional is to want Utopia but this
can’t be had so to mention it is a betrayal so poets who are unemotional and
grim and repressed are much more authentic and undeluded than anyone who feels”.
He fears that anyone who is motional betrays emotions; anyone who has idea
betrays domestic reality. Light is shed on this by his treatment of political
poetry. This occurs in a section about the politics of Larkin and Tomlinson;
they are pure because they weren’t interested in politics, didn’t believe in
political change, didn’t write about the community but always about the
abandoned, cognitively cut off, passive individual. Because they didn’t evince
the slightest interest in politics, they could therefore be conscripted as
witnesses for the proposition that “wanting political change is wrong and
immoral”. Political poetry isn’t allowed into the section on politics and
poetry because it is about politics and therefore corrupt.
A regime
of exclusions
Since the
subject is not within the text, attention is necessarily drawn to its “negative
space”: perhaps the act of exclusion contains a hidden pretextual energy.
Perhaps all the pleasure, all the passion, of this “History” is packed into the
turnstile: thy father was an Amorite, thy mother was an Hittite, ye shall not
enter the house of the LORD.
The act of
repression is the only important gesture in Davie; it is interesting to focus
on this act and slow it down till we can watch it frame by frame. A punitive
grid is applied in which there are thousands of tiny boundaries, and at each
step a poet crosses many of them, causing Davie to writhe in agony. One
suspects that his rules were made with the aim of making transgression: his
rules of metrics, for example, allow him to disapprove several times per line.
The wish to punish comes before ideas of right and wrong.
Davie’s
reluctance to discuss his own position does have one peculiarly literary aspect
to it: it reminds me of certain modernist writers who wrote from a terminal
zone, never explaining or comparing or talking about causes. He takes his pose
of being wounded for nobility of soul. The name Geoffrey Hill springs to mind
here; his inability to write personal poetry goes along with a certain style of
abrupt, apodictic, high-handed, quasi-religious emotion, of vague subject and
cause. What is sent up as honour, sensitivity, pain, appears to the reader as
pride, sullenness, contempt. You explain yourself to equals.
One should
ask how people actually behave, and what wants they are fulfilling, before
legislating, and setting penalties. Linguistics speaks of “complementary
distribution” for two phenomena which fulfil similar functions, but one of
which excludes the other at a given site. There is perhaps a complementary
distribution of archaic, Christian morality, and sociological knowledge: I
mean, Davie’s rusty, pursed-lip, morality would be impossible if he had ever
asked “what are the causes of actions? What are the rules of psychology? How
does society work?” The acts which Davie defines as sins seem to me, no more
serious than eating meat on a Friday. Or even eating spaghetti on a Wednesday.
Meanwhile he excludes social change from his “historical” work.
Prosody:
who is allowed to make rules
The section
on prosody (i.e. stress, melody, duration, and the patterning of these things, as
parts of speech acts) starts with praise of Betjeman as the one to imitate.
According to DD, “prosody … depends very largely on purely notional structures
of expectations.” “For a prosody was precisely a set of notions shared by poet
and reader in tacit compact.” (p.121) I am impressed by the way in which he has
used a fact, which leads naturally on to intersubjectivity, in order to
disenfranchise both writer and reader.
Davie is
right insofar as artistic meaning is based on norms: a voice, husky on a phrase,
is emotional because of its offset from a norm. The question is whether these
norms are promulgated by decree, of based in our emotional intuition and
physiognomic knowledge of living speaking subjects. This ability to hear and
perform “weight” is based on saturation in a living community and is not “notional”.
Clearly, speech is not featureless, but occurs in sharply rhythmic blocks. Is
it likely that the printed poem is unable to signal these rhythms? Natural
prosody gives us weight and duration, pattern, and contrast. Language is not
without measure just because it does not come in ten-syllable bursts. The
boundary marker of every phrase, every clause, every phoneme clause, sets up a
model which successive phrases, clauses, phoneme clauses will be felt as
repetitions of, echoing or varying. The incidence of these is not a “compact”,
but part of the information coded into the character string which is the text.
The poem elapses in this absolute density of phonetic patterns and echoes.
It turns
out that vers libre has every possibility of “prosody” except that of
following rules of repetition; Davie has mistaken this rule-boundedness for
prosody itself. He blames amplified electrical music for damaging our ears, for
this loss so sensitivity. But the problem is evidently one of centralized
authoritarian control versus individual rights.
Davie’s
ideals of prosody have nothing to do with what we hear or say. It follows from
the concept of “norm and variations” described above that it is possible to destroy
any pattern by imposing a set of norms onto it. When Davie reads modern poetry,
he hears a six-syllable line as “four errors”, a fourteen-syllable line as “four
errors”, and so on; thus destroying its contexture. No poetry could survive
this. As criminals, the poets lose their civil rights. Davie acquires eminent
domain over their texts.
Hidden
Agenda
Specifically
modern poetry is difficult because it opens up a potential space, deepening the
process of verbal cognition, withholding certainty so as to make the
conventions of communication and behaviour visible, and make feedback far more
total. This uncertainty is based on the belief that humans can influence the
future. If the reader is against change, all this effort is unrewarding. Davie
writes off 1968. He also writes off changes in society, before and after 1968.
They do not fit into a Christian authoritarian agenda. Symbolic activity by
definition involves very small amounts of energy, small changes. In feedback
loops - such as perception - small changes build up to large ones. Did the
radical consciousness of 1968 have any connection with the radical social
changes, happening after 1968? Symbol-formation is related to change and Davie
wants central repressive control of symbol-formation because he is against
change. Ideas, affecting behaviour, compete with tradition or authority or
Scripture. He wipes out the “smallest steps of change” partly by denying them,
partly by defining them as errors. Since he is against change, it is logical
that he should want poetic language, where new symbols and language rules are
formed, to be frozen or suppressed. The potential space is territorialised.
**
(This was
written as a review for EONTA in about 1991. It never appeared and I lost the
electronic original. You could see the whole of my work on modern poetry as a
drive to utter aloud the knowledge of poets who were consigned to silence in
Davie‘s ridiculously excluding “history“. I think there was a longer version
which said more about the book.)
(“Phoneme clause”
means the groups into which speech falls, the everyday feature which is
stylised to produce the line of verse. I cannot now find the text which uses
this term, but there is a description of the phenomenon in Alan Cruttenden’s
book Intonation (Cambridge University Press, 1986) at pp. 35-45. It is
referred to there as the intonation group. Further “Most commonly […]
intonation groups correspond with clauses.”
The typical length is between four and sixteen syllables. It follows
that the iambic pentameter is not the natural pattern of English poetry,
although ten syllables is quite a common length for a group.)
(This was
1991 and it is wonderful to think how Geoffrey Hill’s poetry changed and
developed after that. The strictures on Hill relate to his work as it stood in
1990 or 91.)
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