Vanity presses, exclusion, etc.
I have been looking again at Clifford's book on poetry publication, which includes price estimates from various publishers who could be interpreted as operating on a play-to-play basis. This exercise took place in roughly 1994. The prices varied from about £2000 to about £4000 for a book. There is a cheaper option available, he records. The figures are interesting because they show how you could have a successful business on that basis.
I searched the BL catalogue to get a count of how many books the publishers named by Clifford published during 1994. This raised a problem, because most of them did mainly prose. (War memoirs and interpretation of bible prophecies featured a lot.) I lacked the energy to disentangle which ones contained poetry. Less than 100 poetry titles, I believe.
My spreadsheets continue to grow and I now have a list of 7000 people who published at least 1 book of poetry during my chosen period, 1960 to 1997. This figure has limited use, since it certainly isn't complete. It is aimed at eliminating incorrect statements about the poetry business. It is a basis for a guess about the total – 8000 poets, I suspect. Of course that raises the question of whether there were another 5000 who didn’t get a book out and who were thronging round the entrances, unable to get in. I really don’t have that figure. The data can only answer certain questions and we don't get to choose which ones those are.
Data can exclude certain outlier theories. For example, theories about the poetry world being closed. This idea doesn't really run with a list of 7000 or even more names who did get included. The pattern is more like – editors turned down work they didn't like but there was a lot of work they did like and, also, there were a lot of editors. The industry did say “no” but you have to tune in to the 7000 yesses.
I can see in my lists several people who began with quite doubtful pay-to-play set-ups and then wrote excellent poetry which also came out from reputable publishers. With the vanity sector, I am thinking not just of artistic incompetence but also of people who lacked self-confidence and drive – and maybe wanted to focus on writing rather than on the door-knocking and marketing (and researching the labyrinths of stylistic loyalty). So a complete gap between vanity projects and “genuine” poets is just a theory and less real than most. I don’t feel like naming the people who made the crossover, but they are good poets and in a way that excludes naivety. I think poets as a group dislike rejection and a paying press is obviously going to spare you that part.
I don't want to start researching this, but I could quite easily list 1000 books which came out on a “pay to play” basis, and it is quite possible that some of them are really good. As, this is an area which the business traditionally overlooks. Also- a bet on poets being timid and avoiding difficulties is a winning bet. If there is a tier of ignored poetry, it is less because elitists all share the same prejudices than because some poets are astute enough to write the poem but not robust enough to send off dozens of submissions. I strongly suppose that if 200 magazine editors see a good poem, then one of them will publish it. In the negative case, evidently, it could be a bad poem. A bad sheaf of poems. But, I can't claim that a sensitive poet-thing can read 100 rejections without becoming hardened in a way which affects the reason why they started the journey.
I have just sent off for a copy of ‘Letter to Lao-Tze’, by John Smith, 1961. He wasn't obscure then, and in fact I know pretty well what this book is going to be like, but he is a writer who has been pretty comprehensively forgotten. This is my way of trying to remember.
I think all poets are a mixture of delusion and scepticism and I doubt that vanity press poets are essentially different. We all share the same belief that our work is really important. To update that a bit, some people like to refer to the “products” of creative writing classes as a separate class of being, as if their love of poetry and their path towards stylistic maturity were actually different from anyone else’s. Now that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people who have spent time in those classes, you can see that there is no really findable division.
Showing posts with label exclusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exclusion. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 July 2021
Tuesday, 11 May 2021
metal detectorists
Metal detectors snouting and snuffling
I was very impressed by the story of the Staffordshire Hoard (of Mercian goldwork) being found by a metal detectorist, and archaeologists subsequently saying that they should co-operate more with detectorists and give them more credit. I saw a magazine for detectorists in WH Smith’s. OK, I thought, this should be interesting. They have limited education, they didn’t get free education at university, they work for a living, maybe they should be accepted as part of a wider intellectual community interested in the past.
Then, I saw a copy of this magazine on-line, on a site I subscribe to which has lots of books uploaded by people. 60 million documents, according to their write-up. So it’s like You-tube, only for books and papers. Anyway, I downloaded this issue of “Treasure Hunting”. I was expecting it to be full of articles about archaeology, and I was interested to see what questions they asked which made it different from a mainstream archaeology magazine. WH Smith has 3 of those, so you can buy those just by walking into Smith’s. But, I was amazed by what I found. The detectorist magazine has no interest in archaeology. The articles are about the first-person experiences of people who use metal detectors, and have no discussion of the meaning of the finds. It is completely about finding treasures, that is where the interest stops. So you would expect reviews of books and exhibitions ...but they don’t run any of those at all. This implies that their readership don’t want to read books, or even visit museums showing large numbers of “treasures”. No, they are too busy walking up and down muddy fields. It follows that the magazine has no actual archaeologists speaking in its pages at all – not even as book reviewers. One corollary is that the hobbyists are not attracted by how much professional archaeologists know, and they don’t. They don’t have to feel themselves as a sub-cultural minority, defined by ignorance. Another one is that there is no trickle of academic ideas into this anti-academic world – they are not even reading reviews of the books, let alone the books. But they don’t feel inferior to the academics. Their focus is incredibly egocentric – they aren't much interested in objects which other people own, because the focus is unswervingly on objects which they own.
It is important to read Paul Barford’s blog with its critical view of detectorists and other looters: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com
Barford refers several times to “object-centred archaeology”, which sadly exhausts itself detailing the history of objects rather than the history of a past society. This is also a way of thinking about the people who read ‘Treasure Hunting’ – they can focus on objects but their interest vanishes when you address any other topic, because they have no interest in abstractions at all. Barford is interested in using physical evidence to think about symbolic behaviour. A potsherd is part of a pattern. So, if someone asked “we have the very first coins in Britain, made for kings of south-eastern tribes and following Gaulish models, what does this tell us about social changes, moving from a society which doesn't need coins to one which needs thousands of them?” – but they wouldn’t be able to pose a question like that and wouldn’t understand the answer if someone pronounced it. As a consequence, they don’t feel that a Renfrew or a Hodder is superior to them. They aren’t interested in the things which intellectual archaeologists can do. They are playing a game in which developing ideas doesn’t count as winning – but finding Tudor coins certainly does. Detecting and collecting isn't even archaeology, it is several levels below “object-centred archaeology”. A coin is primarily a symbolic object, you would think. Or is it primarily a shiny thing?
OK, some of the people who buy “Treasure Hunting” might also buy “British Archaeology”, so their limits are not the same as those of the magazine.
The detectorist set seem to dislike abstraction. They are really happy talking about the details of their ground scanners, and like the objects they dig up – while becoming uncomfortable whenever the discussion moves away from solid objects. It is not simply distrust of the people who own abstract ideas, it is actual discomfort in dealing with ideas at all. So they don’t overlap with the ley-line gang, who have limited interest in physical evidence but are in love with imaginary ideas, and the spirituality of past ages. So they are both against “official archaeology”, but they possibly don’t overlap at all – they just don’t have the same interests. There must be a difference between people who believe everything, no matter how untrue, and people who don’t believe any abstract ideas at all, even if they are true. I couldn't find even one mention of an archaeologist – but there was a photo of a table where someone sat to identify finds, obviously an archaeologist but not named, he was there only to act as scorer, recording that a detectorist had won, and their find was really old.
I was impressed by a photo of finds. They included a broken part of a “Celtic” (Iron Age?) terret ring, in La Tène style – something incredibly beautiful even if it was only an inch across. The patterns just aren't ones you would find today. And there were several pages of photos from an antiques auctioneer, so paid for as ads but still worth looking at. I don’t know why the same ads don’t appear in British Archaeology, maybe their readers don’t want to own artefacts. So there was a photo of a La Tène sword – crunched into a sort of Z shape, but a real one, you could have it for about £5000. Amazing.
This looks to me like two completely different ways of consuming information. The cognitive practices which let someone process a largely abstract story, or data pattern, and enjoy it, are communicated by education, and there is a large pool of non-educated people who don’t share those practices, who regard them as effortful and unrewarding. They become pleasurable because you are fluent in them, you have a smooth experience with few stumbles. This is the “take away” for thinking about poetry – there are many different ways in which people consume information, and modern poetry is divided into factions based on the preferred cognitive patterns. If you don’t wish to own ancient artefacts, maybe you are parting company with a large number of other people. And maybe they can’t enjoy modern archaeology.
I have been reading about the early history of the Mormons, in particular Joseph Smith’s early career as a treasure finder. He had a kind of lens or mirror which would look through all the layers of the earth and find treasure hidden beneath them. So – an early model metal detector. His device came from German folk culture, the so-called “Erdspiegel” which was allegedly used by “Venetians” coming to South Germany to look for ores (or treasures?). Treasure hunting is actually older than archaeology.
The label here may breach rules about how to label. I have labelled this as "exclusion", because it belongs to a theme of which other parts deal with cultural exclusion. But the area involves also people who don't participate in culture because they dislike reading books and don't want to acquire abstract knowledge. The issue for poetry is "willing non-participants", isn't it, less than "failed participants". Even if low-prestige poetry has a physical existence and is easier to write about. I am interested by the distinction between "people who believe irrational ideas about the Past" and "people who don't read books or go to museums". I am not writing "a history of cognitive practices" but I can see that you can't write the history of poetic taste without getting into that area, big time.
I was very impressed by the story of the Staffordshire Hoard (of Mercian goldwork) being found by a metal detectorist, and archaeologists subsequently saying that they should co-operate more with detectorists and give them more credit. I saw a magazine for detectorists in WH Smith’s. OK, I thought, this should be interesting. They have limited education, they didn’t get free education at university, they work for a living, maybe they should be accepted as part of a wider intellectual community interested in the past.
Then, I saw a copy of this magazine on-line, on a site I subscribe to which has lots of books uploaded by people. 60 million documents, according to their write-up. So it’s like You-tube, only for books and papers. Anyway, I downloaded this issue of “Treasure Hunting”. I was expecting it to be full of articles about archaeology, and I was interested to see what questions they asked which made it different from a mainstream archaeology magazine. WH Smith has 3 of those, so you can buy those just by walking into Smith’s. But, I was amazed by what I found. The detectorist magazine has no interest in archaeology. The articles are about the first-person experiences of people who use metal detectors, and have no discussion of the meaning of the finds. It is completely about finding treasures, that is where the interest stops. So you would expect reviews of books and exhibitions ...but they don’t run any of those at all. This implies that their readership don’t want to read books, or even visit museums showing large numbers of “treasures”. No, they are too busy walking up and down muddy fields. It follows that the magazine has no actual archaeologists speaking in its pages at all – not even as book reviewers. One corollary is that the hobbyists are not attracted by how much professional archaeologists know, and they don’t. They don’t have to feel themselves as a sub-cultural minority, defined by ignorance. Another one is that there is no trickle of academic ideas into this anti-academic world – they are not even reading reviews of the books, let alone the books. But they don’t feel inferior to the academics. Their focus is incredibly egocentric – they aren't much interested in objects which other people own, because the focus is unswervingly on objects which they own.
It is important to read Paul Barford’s blog with its critical view of detectorists and other looters: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com
Barford refers several times to “object-centred archaeology”, which sadly exhausts itself detailing the history of objects rather than the history of a past society. This is also a way of thinking about the people who read ‘Treasure Hunting’ – they can focus on objects but their interest vanishes when you address any other topic, because they have no interest in abstractions at all. Barford is interested in using physical evidence to think about symbolic behaviour. A potsherd is part of a pattern. So, if someone asked “we have the very first coins in Britain, made for kings of south-eastern tribes and following Gaulish models, what does this tell us about social changes, moving from a society which doesn't need coins to one which needs thousands of them?” – but they wouldn’t be able to pose a question like that and wouldn’t understand the answer if someone pronounced it. As a consequence, they don’t feel that a Renfrew or a Hodder is superior to them. They aren’t interested in the things which intellectual archaeologists can do. They are playing a game in which developing ideas doesn’t count as winning – but finding Tudor coins certainly does. Detecting and collecting isn't even archaeology, it is several levels below “object-centred archaeology”. A coin is primarily a symbolic object, you would think. Or is it primarily a shiny thing?
OK, some of the people who buy “Treasure Hunting” might also buy “British Archaeology”, so their limits are not the same as those of the magazine.
The detectorist set seem to dislike abstraction. They are really happy talking about the details of their ground scanners, and like the objects they dig up – while becoming uncomfortable whenever the discussion moves away from solid objects. It is not simply distrust of the people who own abstract ideas, it is actual discomfort in dealing with ideas at all. So they don’t overlap with the ley-line gang, who have limited interest in physical evidence but are in love with imaginary ideas, and the spirituality of past ages. So they are both against “official archaeology”, but they possibly don’t overlap at all – they just don’t have the same interests. There must be a difference between people who believe everything, no matter how untrue, and people who don’t believe any abstract ideas at all, even if they are true. I couldn't find even one mention of an archaeologist – but there was a photo of a table where someone sat to identify finds, obviously an archaeologist but not named, he was there only to act as scorer, recording that a detectorist had won, and their find was really old.
I was impressed by a photo of finds. They included a broken part of a “Celtic” (Iron Age?) terret ring, in La Tène style – something incredibly beautiful even if it was only an inch across. The patterns just aren't ones you would find today. And there were several pages of photos from an antiques auctioneer, so paid for as ads but still worth looking at. I don’t know why the same ads don’t appear in British Archaeology, maybe their readers don’t want to own artefacts. So there was a photo of a La Tène sword – crunched into a sort of Z shape, but a real one, you could have it for about £5000. Amazing.
This looks to me like two completely different ways of consuming information. The cognitive practices which let someone process a largely abstract story, or data pattern, and enjoy it, are communicated by education, and there is a large pool of non-educated people who don’t share those practices, who regard them as effortful and unrewarding. They become pleasurable because you are fluent in them, you have a smooth experience with few stumbles. This is the “take away” for thinking about poetry – there are many different ways in which people consume information, and modern poetry is divided into factions based on the preferred cognitive patterns. If you don’t wish to own ancient artefacts, maybe you are parting company with a large number of other people. And maybe they can’t enjoy modern archaeology.
I have been reading about the early history of the Mormons, in particular Joseph Smith’s early career as a treasure finder. He had a kind of lens or mirror which would look through all the layers of the earth and find treasure hidden beneath them. So – an early model metal detector. His device came from German folk culture, the so-called “Erdspiegel” which was allegedly used by “Venetians” coming to South Germany to look for ores (or treasures?). Treasure hunting is actually older than archaeology.
The label here may breach rules about how to label. I have labelled this as "exclusion", because it belongs to a theme of which other parts deal with cultural exclusion. But the area involves also people who don't participate in culture because they dislike reading books and don't want to acquire abstract knowledge. The issue for poetry is "willing non-participants", isn't it, less than "failed participants". Even if low-prestige poetry has a physical existence and is easier to write about. I am interested by the distinction between "people who believe irrational ideas about the Past" and "people who don't read books or go to museums". I am not writing "a history of cognitive practices" but I can see that you can't write the history of poetic taste without getting into that area, big time.
Saturday, 27 March 2021
vanity presses - figures
I have been doing catalogue work, which involves crawling through lumpy data with the goal of counting how many poetry books were published in a given year. Something which comes up, to the point of distracting attention from the overall goal, is vanity presses. As you look at large amounts of data, it becomes obvious that a big share of the “gross output” is from presses which asked the author to pay and which barely tried to sell the books. This is discouraging – the big story is “2700 new titles in a single year”, as Randall Stevenson points out, but the possibility that 500 or 800 of these are vanity titles must affect the clarity of the picture.
I have tagged this as "exclusion" although it is talking about books that were published, literally. But, the reasons why someone would pay for publication are all tangled up with the reasons why they couldn't get legitimate publication. They pay because they are outsiders - the door has shut in their faces. When you list the v-p titles, you are making the invisible poets visible. It's a spook effect.
It would be nice to think that vanity publishing belonged to an era when the industry was very conservative and people were afraid of starting up small to micro publishers, and that the realm of frustrated poets had declined or disappeared. This does not appear to be true. The idea that there could be many people who wanted to be poets, but had no understanding of other people who liked poetry, and no ability to connect with magazines, readings series, etc., only in a repressed state of society, where people failed to act on their deepest impulses, does not hold true. The poetry world is still an “inside” surrounded by outsiders.
I got a book about poetry publishing by someone so stupid that the idea of their producing a book was ridiculous. One valid moment - he gets prices out of vanity presses as part of a sting operation. Yes, they want your money! The book I am looking at is by Johnathon Clifford and he contacted (in 1994) 11 publishers in this dubious area. One of them wrote back asking for an “author’s contribution of at least £3,500 with an average being in the region of £5,500”. This is higher than their competitors. So, the publisher has to pay for the printing costs (in the region of £1250) out of this, but the rest is pure profit. The author would get some cash refunded if someone buys a copy of the book, but that is fairly unlikely – at least outside the author's friends.
I did a catalogue search for the most assiduous vanity publisher, in the British Library holdings, and came up with 6906 titles. That is over several decades, and maybe half of that is poetry books. This sector involves a lot of people. The only interesting point is that they are outsiders – if they had friends in the business, they would know that bookshops, reviewers, etc. avoid books from these twilight publishers. The route almost guarantees invisibility for your work. Most likely this ignorance of the business goes along with ignorance about taste – if you don’t know people who buy and read modern poetry, your chance of grasping what modern poetry really is is restricted. Why would you pay five grand to get your book published, when a convinced publisher will do it for free? My assumption would be that vanity press writers produce bad poetry, based on psychological ignorance. I have to concede that I am not going to read a few dozen “author funded” books to check this out.
I don’t think poetry is a secret world, you just have to turn up to readings or classes and hang out with the people you meet there. This is why it has been an open world, since the 1960s; I can imagine there weren't many readings groups in the 1950s. It is baffling how there can still be people who find modern poetry impossible to find and mix with, when the ways of getting involved are so numerous (and so cheap). I can see that as at 1961 there were many frustrated people, because the number of titles coming out was genuinely low, but with the arrival of dozens of small presses in the Sixties it would seem that the frustration should have been burnt up – part of a general “derepression” which affected every aspect of national life. I am assuming that if you mix with other people, read recent poetry, listen to readings, listen to what people say about what they like, you will have enough empathy to understand the whole situation and to know how to write poems. Everyone knows poetry is about empathy. If you can't figure it all out by deploying empathy, you probably can't write good poems anyway. The outsider is the person in the room who doesn't grasp what everyone else is thinking and feeling. The information flow is there, but not there for them.
The overall picture is that, yes, 2000 poetry titles are coming out in a given year. Acquiring expertise in a field so large seems like a hopeless task. But visibly, people are in love with the idea of being a poet. And whatever defence works people may try to set up, the floodgates are open – the business is wide open, to an incredible extent. Any theory of exclusion crumbles in face of the publication figures – it is not compatible with the facts, as you can collect them just by logging onto the British Library catalogue, for free.
I don't want to name names, but aimlessly sculling around this swamp has produced three poets whom I take seriously and who started out by using either full-on vanity press or half-way (the publisher Outpsts). Analysing these cases might reveal a situation more complex than just being an outsider. Possibly, someone might be too busy to haggle with publishers - and go with Outposts because it was economical in use of time.
I have tagged this as "exclusion" although it is talking about books that were published, literally. But, the reasons why someone would pay for publication are all tangled up with the reasons why they couldn't get legitimate publication. They pay because they are outsiders - the door has shut in their faces. When you list the v-p titles, you are making the invisible poets visible. It's a spook effect.
It would be nice to think that vanity publishing belonged to an era when the industry was very conservative and people were afraid of starting up small to micro publishers, and that the realm of frustrated poets had declined or disappeared. This does not appear to be true. The idea that there could be many people who wanted to be poets, but had no understanding of other people who liked poetry, and no ability to connect with magazines, readings series, etc., only in a repressed state of society, where people failed to act on their deepest impulses, does not hold true. The poetry world is still an “inside” surrounded by outsiders.
I got a book about poetry publishing by someone so stupid that the idea of their producing a book was ridiculous. One valid moment - he gets prices out of vanity presses as part of a sting operation. Yes, they want your money! The book I am looking at is by Johnathon Clifford and he contacted (in 1994) 11 publishers in this dubious area. One of them wrote back asking for an “author’s contribution of at least £3,500 with an average being in the region of £5,500”. This is higher than their competitors. So, the publisher has to pay for the printing costs (in the region of £1250) out of this, but the rest is pure profit. The author would get some cash refunded if someone buys a copy of the book, but that is fairly unlikely – at least outside the author's friends.
I did a catalogue search for the most assiduous vanity publisher, in the British Library holdings, and came up with 6906 titles. That is over several decades, and maybe half of that is poetry books. This sector involves a lot of people. The only interesting point is that they are outsiders – if they had friends in the business, they would know that bookshops, reviewers, etc. avoid books from these twilight publishers. The route almost guarantees invisibility for your work. Most likely this ignorance of the business goes along with ignorance about taste – if you don’t know people who buy and read modern poetry, your chance of grasping what modern poetry really is is restricted. Why would you pay five grand to get your book published, when a convinced publisher will do it for free? My assumption would be that vanity press writers produce bad poetry, based on psychological ignorance. I have to concede that I am not going to read a few dozen “author funded” books to check this out.
I don’t think poetry is a secret world, you just have to turn up to readings or classes and hang out with the people you meet there. This is why it has been an open world, since the 1960s; I can imagine there weren't many readings groups in the 1950s. It is baffling how there can still be people who find modern poetry impossible to find and mix with, when the ways of getting involved are so numerous (and so cheap). I can see that as at 1961 there were many frustrated people, because the number of titles coming out was genuinely low, but with the arrival of dozens of small presses in the Sixties it would seem that the frustration should have been burnt up – part of a general “derepression” which affected every aspect of national life. I am assuming that if you mix with other people, read recent poetry, listen to readings, listen to what people say about what they like, you will have enough empathy to understand the whole situation and to know how to write poems. Everyone knows poetry is about empathy. If you can't figure it all out by deploying empathy, you probably can't write good poems anyway. The outsider is the person in the room who doesn't grasp what everyone else is thinking and feeling. The information flow is there, but not there for them.
The overall picture is that, yes, 2000 poetry titles are coming out in a given year. Acquiring expertise in a field so large seems like a hopeless task. But visibly, people are in love with the idea of being a poet. And whatever defence works people may try to set up, the floodgates are open – the business is wide open, to an incredible extent. Any theory of exclusion crumbles in face of the publication figures – it is not compatible with the facts, as you can collect them just by logging onto the British Library catalogue, for free.
I don't want to name names, but aimlessly sculling around this swamp has produced three poets whom I take seriously and who started out by using either full-on vanity press or half-way (the publisher Outpsts). Analysing these cases might reveal a situation more complex than just being an outsider. Possibly, someone might be too busy to haggle with publishers - and go with Outposts because it was economical in use of time.
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.
Monday, 22 October 2018
does the poetry world welcome people?
Turning back at the Threshhold
Had a conversation with Khaled Hakim last night (9/10/18) after a reading. Discussed amongst other thing the affluence of women and ethnic minority artists to the poetic avant garde, in the past. The reasons for the lack of diversity in the avant-garde are impossible to disentangle, but the outcome is a Thing, it’s an object of discussion and I have thought about it a lot in the past year – which is why I think you can’t resolve it. However, if you look at Conductors of Chaos (1996), you find 5 female poets out of 36. (And zero “non-European immigrants”, or however you put it.) This shows a much worse (i.e. less diverse) situation than in the mainstream at an equivalent date, and furthermore attempts to assemble an anthology of the Underground poets who emerged after 1977 have failed because the pattern which emerges is now sociologically unacceptable (and not subject to admiration when developed in an anthology).
If you compare Conductors with an anthology which came out a year later and covered the same period (but from a neo-mainstream point of view), you find that Conductors has roughly 14% women and The New Poetry has roughly 29%. Actually, the Underground was significantly more male-dominated (or, unattractive to women), and this is one of the things it is beneficial to discuss. It’s part of the picture – even if the only story that the participants want to hear is of “lonely and impoverished virtue”. (Further comparison. The 1988 anthology the new british poetry has two sections of alternative poetry. They contain 43 poets of whom six are female. These are almost the same figures as in Conductors.)
Part of writing about modern poetry in a connected way is that you realise that the result isn’t connected, I mean that you can’t answer most of the questions which people could ask about “why?”
Khaled was talking about The Film-makers’ Co-Op and how Bob Cobbing had been one of the people who set it up (in 1968 or whenever it was). The film-makers, the London Musicians Collective (which meant free jazz, exclusively), and various poetry gigs, all happened in that old British Rail equipment depot in Gloucester Avenue. God knows how many times I went there in the Eighties. Times past counting. Khaled was involved (don’t know when, maybe from 1995 on?) in both the film-making and the poetry scene. He was telling us that the film-makers didn’t have this diversity problem, they had lots of ethnic minority people and lots of LGBT people as well. The problem just didn’t exist for that collective – or, the obstacles weren’t off-putting for the young people who turned up wanting to be creative. So we didn’t get to the stage of making invisible obstacles speak and utter their names, but we did see everything going well for one branch of art –and badly for another. I found the contrast quite devastating to think about. I think people want to deny that any such obstacles ever existed. I also think that making the “silent rules” audible and subject to discussion, subject also to tweaking and reform, is going to be a feature of the arts scene in the next couple of decades, something which will be there but wasn’t there over the last 50 years.
I think at this point people think sociological awareness means “there should be a rule that anyone who doesn’t like me has to leave” and “because I wasn’t promised enough rewards for participating and didn’t participate the Scene should offer me fabulous levels of compensation for turning up at all”. It is not going to work like that, and these vain demands are a sign of an immature stage of what in maturity will be splendid and robust.
The New Poetry has Irish poets (11 out of 55 people). Conductors doesn’t do Ireland – this is just one of the differences which is hard to analyse. Most questions can’t be answered.
I used to spend time with someone who knew a lot of poets’ wives – she was a recipient for the gossip, and the social scene around poetry (Cambridge poetry) in a way that I wasn’t. She stated that most of the wives had a witheringly indifferent attitude towards the Cambridge poetry which their husbands wrote. Like, “if you aren’t going to get written about in the Observer magazine there is no point you doing it”. Or “you don’t get events put on at the ICA so you are a failure and persisting is just selfish”. It was disapproving tolerance and certainly not support and admiration. The advent of feminism meant that it was fashionable for women to define men’s private artistic interests as “egotistic and indulgent” rather than as a way to the truth. At an elementary level, the flocking of new women poets into the mainstream was the cause of the revival of the mainstream in the Eighties and of the defensive and cut-off situation of the poetic Underground. The discrediting of female art debilitated the innovative poetry scene because most of the innovative poets of the past had been male. There are a thousand stories and I don’t even want to tell all of them. Clearly there has been a past of women selflessly supporting unpopular male artists, reading what they did as a versions of a Saint’s Life. In history, saints’ lives stopped, at some point, being the most popular reading and listening matter – and maybe the male artist’s life also stopped being so central (and specifically, after 1980 or maybe even after 1975). This was bound to affect unpopular (”Underground”) male artists born in the 1950s. If you shed that mythology of art, it became undeniable that poetry had to access an audience, and that the only way to do this was to write in a very simple, open style, using stylistic effects which everyone was familiar with because of their traditional nature. So it was that new women poets arriving on the scene in the Eighties overwhelmingly plumped for a mainstream style.
Explaining the male centre of the Underground through the lack of material rewards does not work when you look at the Film-makers’ Co-Op. Nobody could have turned up to that more than once without realising that everyone was broke and no-one was going to start making a living out of their “structural speculations” anytime soon. If people found it so attractive, it must have had something that poetry didn’t have. It’s reasonable to think that the very same people would have got involved in poetry if the public events had been equally inspiring (and inhibition-breaking). Thinking about it now, it might have been better for me, in terms of having fun and getting close to other people, if I’d got into film-making in 1981 and not gone on with poetry (which no-one published).
SubVoicive was a series of avant-garde readings taking place fortnightly (except during the summer) throughout the Eighties. It was stable, so it could gradually have built up an audience. Audiences were stable but tiny. They took place in London, a city of 8 million people, in the South-east region, which held probably 17 million people in all. Why of 8 million people did only 20 turn up? Once you explain this, it becomes much simpler to explain why so few poets (including Asian and female ones, obviously) didn’t want to participate. Crudely, a lot of eager poets who turned up probably saw the small audience, the primitive arrangements of the venue (upper rooms in a pub), the home-made quality of the publications, the lack of connections to a wider world, and didn’t come back. The idea of spending 30 years of endeavour to reach the level of non-success (failure?) of the senior poets in that world just wasn’t a big turn-on.
Reconstructing what someone saw, on a single visit, and why they didn’t come back, has become a Thing. Because you can’t get at the ‘lack of diversity problem’ without getting at why people said No. The lack of evidence is overwhelming – if people entered the pipe and went on for 20 years, you can easily get information about them. It’s cheap. But as for half a million people who saw the announcement for SubVoicive in Time Out, once, or every two weeks for decades, how do you get information about them, and why they didn’t react with excitement?
What I think is happening today is that people, especially would-be managers, are intensely imagining the threshold moments where people decided not to come in and join the scene. These moments could be very rich in psychological content, but they don’t leave any documentary evidence. My guess is that people take the key decisions at the point when they have the smallest amount of information. People who encounter the Alternative Scene once and say “no” have very little to base the decision on. Actually the Alt Scene has generally been so close to invisible that you could only find it by accident. To read that little listing for SubVoicive, you would have to know that it was “the alternative scene” and also have a concept that there was such a scene in existence. It took me ten years, after I moved to London, to get involved with that scene. People want to ask the retrospective question ”what was the Underground’s recruitment strategy and what resources did they make available for new starts”, but that just exposes the fact that the Underground had no resources, was a “body without organs”, and didn’t have any policies or organisation. To some extent, people are inventing something that was never there in order to de-legitimate it.
This line of intellectual inquiry starts to overflow into the area of marketing. OK. You can’t do market research on a zero budget. No budget, no data. This could be an infinite discussion, because without data you can never disprove any explanation, however stupid, and people will sustain their tawdry and self-serving fantasies for ever. Is that the ideal discussion? Ideal because never boring and totally inconclusive, maybe. The idea that nobody will ever be proved wrong is attractive.
SubVoicive wasn’t the only entry point for modern-style poetry, of course. It is likely that most of the gifted poets in London were absent from any SubVoicive event on any named evening. Modernity was happening beyond the edge of the Underground rail network, I suspect. It’s just a point to focus on.
The Underground had this exclusivity. And this determination not to get involved in star-myths. To deconstruct the idealisation of the Artist. Perhaps by achieving those goals it doomed itself to marginality, and incidentally to not achieving “diversity”. It blocked out the signals which novice creative people found most attractive.
Having reached the end, I am wondering if I have answered any questions at all. Oh dear. But maybe I haven’t disseminated any self-serving myths. That would be a start.
Had a conversation with Khaled Hakim last night (9/10/18) after a reading. Discussed amongst other thing the affluence of women and ethnic minority artists to the poetic avant garde, in the past. The reasons for the lack of diversity in the avant-garde are impossible to disentangle, but the outcome is a Thing, it’s an object of discussion and I have thought about it a lot in the past year – which is why I think you can’t resolve it. However, if you look at Conductors of Chaos (1996), you find 5 female poets out of 36. (And zero “non-European immigrants”, or however you put it.) This shows a much worse (i.e. less diverse) situation than in the mainstream at an equivalent date, and furthermore attempts to assemble an anthology of the Underground poets who emerged after 1977 have failed because the pattern which emerges is now sociologically unacceptable (and not subject to admiration when developed in an anthology).
If you compare Conductors with an anthology which came out a year later and covered the same period (but from a neo-mainstream point of view), you find that Conductors has roughly 14% women and The New Poetry has roughly 29%. Actually, the Underground was significantly more male-dominated (or, unattractive to women), and this is one of the things it is beneficial to discuss. It’s part of the picture – even if the only story that the participants want to hear is of “lonely and impoverished virtue”. (Further comparison. The 1988 anthology the new british poetry has two sections of alternative poetry. They contain 43 poets of whom six are female. These are almost the same figures as in Conductors.)
Part of writing about modern poetry in a connected way is that you realise that the result isn’t connected, I mean that you can’t answer most of the questions which people could ask about “why?”
Khaled was talking about The Film-makers’ Co-Op and how Bob Cobbing had been one of the people who set it up (in 1968 or whenever it was). The film-makers, the London Musicians Collective (which meant free jazz, exclusively), and various poetry gigs, all happened in that old British Rail equipment depot in Gloucester Avenue. God knows how many times I went there in the Eighties. Times past counting. Khaled was involved (don’t know when, maybe from 1995 on?) in both the film-making and the poetry scene. He was telling us that the film-makers didn’t have this diversity problem, they had lots of ethnic minority people and lots of LGBT people as well. The problem just didn’t exist for that collective – or, the obstacles weren’t off-putting for the young people who turned up wanting to be creative. So we didn’t get to the stage of making invisible obstacles speak and utter their names, but we did see everything going well for one branch of art –and badly for another. I found the contrast quite devastating to think about. I think people want to deny that any such obstacles ever existed. I also think that making the “silent rules” audible and subject to discussion, subject also to tweaking and reform, is going to be a feature of the arts scene in the next couple of decades, something which will be there but wasn’t there over the last 50 years.
I think at this point people think sociological awareness means “there should be a rule that anyone who doesn’t like me has to leave” and “because I wasn’t promised enough rewards for participating and didn’t participate the Scene should offer me fabulous levels of compensation for turning up at all”. It is not going to work like that, and these vain demands are a sign of an immature stage of what in maturity will be splendid and robust.
The New Poetry has Irish poets (11 out of 55 people). Conductors doesn’t do Ireland – this is just one of the differences which is hard to analyse. Most questions can’t be answered.
I used to spend time with someone who knew a lot of poets’ wives – she was a recipient for the gossip, and the social scene around poetry (Cambridge poetry) in a way that I wasn’t. She stated that most of the wives had a witheringly indifferent attitude towards the Cambridge poetry which their husbands wrote. Like, “if you aren’t going to get written about in the Observer magazine there is no point you doing it”. Or “you don’t get events put on at the ICA so you are a failure and persisting is just selfish”. It was disapproving tolerance and certainly not support and admiration. The advent of feminism meant that it was fashionable for women to define men’s private artistic interests as “egotistic and indulgent” rather than as a way to the truth. At an elementary level, the flocking of new women poets into the mainstream was the cause of the revival of the mainstream in the Eighties and of the defensive and cut-off situation of the poetic Underground. The discrediting of female art debilitated the innovative poetry scene because most of the innovative poets of the past had been male. There are a thousand stories and I don’t even want to tell all of them. Clearly there has been a past of women selflessly supporting unpopular male artists, reading what they did as a versions of a Saint’s Life. In history, saints’ lives stopped, at some point, being the most popular reading and listening matter – and maybe the male artist’s life also stopped being so central (and specifically, after 1980 or maybe even after 1975). This was bound to affect unpopular (”Underground”) male artists born in the 1950s. If you shed that mythology of art, it became undeniable that poetry had to access an audience, and that the only way to do this was to write in a very simple, open style, using stylistic effects which everyone was familiar with because of their traditional nature. So it was that new women poets arriving on the scene in the Eighties overwhelmingly plumped for a mainstream style.
Explaining the male centre of the Underground through the lack of material rewards does not work when you look at the Film-makers’ Co-Op. Nobody could have turned up to that more than once without realising that everyone was broke and no-one was going to start making a living out of their “structural speculations” anytime soon. If people found it so attractive, it must have had something that poetry didn’t have. It’s reasonable to think that the very same people would have got involved in poetry if the public events had been equally inspiring (and inhibition-breaking). Thinking about it now, it might have been better for me, in terms of having fun and getting close to other people, if I’d got into film-making in 1981 and not gone on with poetry (which no-one published).
SubVoicive was a series of avant-garde readings taking place fortnightly (except during the summer) throughout the Eighties. It was stable, so it could gradually have built up an audience. Audiences were stable but tiny. They took place in London, a city of 8 million people, in the South-east region, which held probably 17 million people in all. Why of 8 million people did only 20 turn up? Once you explain this, it becomes much simpler to explain why so few poets (including Asian and female ones, obviously) didn’t want to participate. Crudely, a lot of eager poets who turned up probably saw the small audience, the primitive arrangements of the venue (upper rooms in a pub), the home-made quality of the publications, the lack of connections to a wider world, and didn’t come back. The idea of spending 30 years of endeavour to reach the level of non-success (failure?) of the senior poets in that world just wasn’t a big turn-on.
Reconstructing what someone saw, on a single visit, and why they didn’t come back, has become a Thing. Because you can’t get at the ‘lack of diversity problem’ without getting at why people said No. The lack of evidence is overwhelming – if people entered the pipe and went on for 20 years, you can easily get information about them. It’s cheap. But as for half a million people who saw the announcement for SubVoicive in Time Out, once, or every two weeks for decades, how do you get information about them, and why they didn’t react with excitement?
What I think is happening today is that people, especially would-be managers, are intensely imagining the threshold moments where people decided not to come in and join the scene. These moments could be very rich in psychological content, but they don’t leave any documentary evidence. My guess is that people take the key decisions at the point when they have the smallest amount of information. People who encounter the Alternative Scene once and say “no” have very little to base the decision on. Actually the Alt Scene has generally been so close to invisible that you could only find it by accident. To read that little listing for SubVoicive, you would have to know that it was “the alternative scene” and also have a concept that there was such a scene in existence. It took me ten years, after I moved to London, to get involved with that scene. People want to ask the retrospective question ”what was the Underground’s recruitment strategy and what resources did they make available for new starts”, but that just exposes the fact that the Underground had no resources, was a “body without organs”, and didn’t have any policies or organisation. To some extent, people are inventing something that was never there in order to de-legitimate it.
This line of intellectual inquiry starts to overflow into the area of marketing. OK. You can’t do market research on a zero budget. No budget, no data. This could be an infinite discussion, because without data you can never disprove any explanation, however stupid, and people will sustain their tawdry and self-serving fantasies for ever. Is that the ideal discussion? Ideal because never boring and totally inconclusive, maybe. The idea that nobody will ever be proved wrong is attractive.
SubVoicive wasn’t the only entry point for modern-style poetry, of course. It is likely that most of the gifted poets in London were absent from any SubVoicive event on any named evening. Modernity was happening beyond the edge of the Underground rail network, I suspect. It’s just a point to focus on.
The Underground had this exclusivity. And this determination not to get involved in star-myths. To deconstruct the idealisation of the Artist. Perhaps by achieving those goals it doomed itself to marginality, and incidentally to not achieving “diversity”. It blocked out the signals which novice creative people found most attractive.
Having reached the end, I am wondering if I have answered any questions at all. Oh dear. But maybe I haven’t disseminated any self-serving myths. That would be a start.
Saturday, 16 April 2016
ethnocentricity as fatigue as malice
Parmar cites another essay
(”Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant Garde”, by Cathy Park Hong) which is
reported to be about the American avant-garde’s belief that rejecting
Republican values (crudely) makes them politically innocent and neutral (this
is the “delusion of whiteness”) and so that there is no need for further
engagement with poetry by ethnic minorities - whose critique of dominant
American traditions (and the propaganda for the avant garde has been
overwhelmingly nationalistic in the USA) is assumed to be anticipated and
rolled-up and answered by the critique which founded the official poetic
avant-garde. She also published a much more detailed essay (in the Los
Angeles Review of Books, 2015, available on-line) from which some quotes
are as follows. (BAME means “Black and minority ethnic” and
seems to exclude Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. The acronym BME seems to be more common
in Britain.)
>>It
can only be a good thing that British poetry publishing is slowly becoming more
racially diverse. But is it enough for poets of color to simply win prizes and
appear more frequently in publishers’ catalogs? Does this adequately challenge
a national tradition in which so few ethnically diverse voices have been
historically heard? I worry increased visibility of BAME poets is superficial
and, when the dust settles, British poetry will return to a largely
monochromatic, monolingual expression of sameness. The literary establishment
here needs to rethink the subject matter, aesthetic modes, and assumptions
about “literariness” made about poets of color in the United Kingdom.
While
it won a major UK award, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a
striking example of exactly what is not happening in popular
British poetry. [...]
Both
contemporary avant-garde poetry in the United Kingdom, with its dispersal of
the lyric “subject” through linguistic process, and the British mainstream’s
Movement-inspired poem leave little room for expressions of complex identity
and difference. At times, in the hands of a BAME poet the lyric form can become
a beguiling call toward the homogenous white space of intimate revelation and
universality. Expressions of difference enact a kind of closure that erases the
ambiguities and subjectivities upon which poetry depends — after all, as bell
hooks reminds us, “language is a place of struggle.” And while no one wishes,
least of all me, to argue that BAME poets should or should not write about
specific subjects, the singular lyric voice should not merely reproduce poetic
sameness through an universal “I” or self-fetishizing difference through a
poetic diction of otherness.
Contemporary
British poetry lacks a vocabulary to speak about race, and a willingness to be
critical, despite this happening elsewhere in literary and cultural studies.
How is
it possible that only a few poets of color in the United Kingdom appear in
anthologies, magazines, reading series, presses dedicated solely to innovative
and experimental poetics? How is it that the centers of “radical” poetics — the
supposedly progressive, Marxist annex within overwhelmingly white universities
— willingly exclude poets of color from their registers? Especially those who
partake in the dreaded work of “identity politics”? One recent example is Emily
Critchley’s anticipated follow-up to Maggie O’Sullivan’s Out of
Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America &
the UK (1996), which has just been published. Out of 44 experimental
women poets, it appears that three are of Asian descent (Sascha Akhtar, Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge, and Myung Mi Kim) and only one is black (the British poet
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett) — a total of two North American and two UK writers of
color. I can think of several inexplicable omissions — a jaw-droppingly long
list that would include Harryette Mullen, Bhanu Kapil, Evie Shockley, and M.
NourbeSe Philip, and even slightly more mainstream British poets Sarah Howe and
Vahni Capildeo [.] <<
Poetry is not a study, I don’t
think.
I emailed Sandeep about this, in
connection with some other things.
>> […] about ethnic
identification. I read your article and it is very interesting. I do agree with
it. I have to say that where you describe Emily as “excluding” certain people, it
might seem to EC and others that they spend all day including people, to the
point of exhaustion, and it is only post factum that their activity is defined
as excluding people all day. I think there is an equality (& diversity)
problem with the uptake of BAME poets, and it has to do with empathy fatigue.
Empathy is powerful but gets tired quickly. When the Cambridge Conference of
Contemporary Poetry was happening, German poets used to come over and there
would be almost no audience for them. Kevin and Leslie got them over and got
funding from German arts bodies, I would translate them, which was bloody
difficult, and then there would be 20 people in the audience. Everyone stayed
in the bar. They were right there, in the building next to where the poetry
was. This was mild xenophobia. Karlien explained it to me, as the students
(others too) were willing to go to English and American poets but it stopped
there. European poets didn’t count. Anyway, if
everyone you know is in the bar, it is attractive to stay there, you would
follow if everyone else left to go to the gig. So I think this is probably true
for BAME poets. Did you carry out a xenophobic act? no, I just stayed in the
bar. When Romana organised an Anglo-American conference, about 15 (?) years
ago, in Michigan or somewhere, and busloads of English poet/ideologues were
there, I was told that when there was a talk about an English poet the
Americans weren’t in the auditorium. They were in the cafe or possibly
even in the bar. If it was about Americans, they had to go, but if it was
somebody English it was obviously Totally Unimportant and time for an extended
coffee klatsch and networking session. Hi, I think you’re so great, please plug my next book. These are the
silent rules. It’s a little hard to see who makes them. People are
centric, they get out of being egocentric but move into being group-centric.
I think it’s good to talk about these things. Reflexivity is
desirable even if people resist it all they can. These aren’t conscious decisions and there is no rule-making
forum which deliberates.
I spoke of empathy fatigue. I
think it needs a bit of a jog.I calculated/ guessed that there are 9000 people in Britain who have published at least one book of poetry. The figure may be wrong. Anyway, there is no institutional power of comparable magnitude. There is no institution which would bring about justice. Who are you going to sue? Instead there is something spontaneous and ineffective. It does seem possible that we now have a grasp on what happened in the 70s, although the “we” may not be able to get that view across. It took a long time to reach this.<<
I doubt this was very convincing. Actually, this exchange filled me with a pervasive sense of doubt.
My voluble and excitable critical
career has NOT involved talking about the topic which Sandeep says we want to
avoid. Except for me banging on about Wales and Scotland, which involves
majorities rather than minorities. Am I an ethnic minority or not. Maybe we
could run through the findings again. If you take the subjective act of
identification and projection as an action sequence, you can imagine it being
filmed. And then, the film being examined frame by frame to find the patterns.
This is like what athletes do with film of their running actions and so on -
things they can’t see but need to be hyper-aware of. If you could look at a
film of poetic subjectivity, you would find a systematic bias towards the
in-group the reader belongs to - so egocentricity, group-egocentricity,
“centricity” in general. So minority ethnic poets don’t get the uptake, in
anthologies, maybe in reviews or textbooks, probably in bookshop sales,
probably in live audience response, which they deserve. The poem-response does
not involve the language of the poem, only, but also preverbal identification
with the people in the poem, so the person speaking as much as other people.
This identification, this occupation of another self, is ethnocentric, as well
as being egocentric, and in practice there is a White Anglo-American in-group
and this diffuse, unarticulated, self-domain is a factor in the appreciation of
contemporary poetry. Due to the influence of television and popular music on
the socialisation of children growing up since about 1960, or maybe 1956,
Americans are readily accepted as identification objects in Britain, and so the
in-group can sensibly be called “Anglo-American“.
Just to recap, we never did photograph
that process. So my version might not be true. It’s just that I feel it’s like
that, and this feeling is shared by a lot of people. If you ever come to look
at anthologies over the period 1960-2010 (let’s say), it is very noticeable how
few “minority ethnics” are found in those pages.
I can’t make any clear statements about this “in group” thing, but, as
Sandeep said, people find it hard to talk about, and I think just by talking
about it we can make progress on this thing. Talking might help unconscious
decisions rise to the surface and become visible. We are talking about empathy
fatigue, and trying to reach people about this is like waking them up. It is by
definition where consciousness and interest have stopped. Until they wake up
they obviously can’t hear you at all.
I am much more emotionally
involved in the silent exclusion of Welsh and Scottish poets than in, say,
South Asian poets. Obviously, the centric effect is not the only one in operation, and there is also an exoticism effect, where something strange is much more stimulating than something familiar, and indeed poetry has to be strange to some extent. If we consider archaeology, it is apparent that the search for ancestors means that people look for an in-group which they belong to in the first millennium BC. This is absurd, but if you read the literature it is obviously happening. But if you look at British Museum exhibitions, the two most popular they ever had were the Gold of Tutankhamun and the Terracotta Warriors. So, both from another continent. The market is not rigidly ethnocentric. Of course both those exhibitions were associated with supreme secular power, monarchs who possessed staggering power, and artefacts built to embody that power.
We also have to mention the aspiration to equality. People genuinely want culture to be fair, not predisposed to leave some people out in the cold. This impulse can either take the form of anxiety which puts you off the pleasures of culture, or of denying the suggestion that the poetry culture is biased towards the dominant ethnic group. Further, the basis is spontaneous and personal, whereas the egalitarian drives come mainly, or seem to come mainly, from the government, from officials who are structurally inhibited from pushing their personal views - but who recognise the whole spectrum of citizens as their target and, indeed, as their employers and bosses. It is hardly a secret that grant awarding bodies have put pressure on publishers, possibly also event organisers, to take on more poets from ethnic minorities. This may have had the corollary of publishing books that the public isn’t very interested by (and which possibly haven’t been looked after very carefully by editors). One more thing - the border of the “in-group” can change in five minutes. The edges of these “domains of the self” are remarkably soft - their capacity for change is so prominent, and drawing a map that embodies the limit of identification is dubious because the border has probably moved by the time you have drawn the map. The “in-group” for poetry is evidently Anglo-American; due to the prominence of television and pop music in the socialisation of children since 1960 or so, it is easy for British people to identify with Americans in art and there is no real barrier. This connects with the way literature is taught in schools. While this is a culture on a large geographical scale, it is hardly an in-group with no out-groups.
You can’t have a multi-cultural society made up of monocultural individuals. Of course the immigrants, first second or third generation, etc., are bicultural and it is the “old northwest Europeans” who are monocultural. My point is that it is feasible for grant-awarding institutions to be multi-cultural. It does seem like a collaborative thing, a thing provided by institutions. The government belongs to everybody but culture belongs to the people who enjoy it.
Sandeep also pours scorn on the dislike of the “alternative” poetry scene for the politics of identity. I can’t agree with this. The idea that poems are just vehicles for a personality is dangerous, because every personality has equal value and it seems likely that poems have unequal value. To explain what happens, we do better to shift axis and say that a poem is a piece of linguistic technology and that this is known to few people, comparable to the knowledge of how to write a program in C. Obviously much of the discourse around poetry acts as if poems were no more than lumps of personality. The residual elements of narcissism and group narcissism within the poetic field are essential but very hard to articulate. No particular words or syllables of the poem record this element, and analysis of it is retarded. It is likely to cause particular problems to people perceived as outsiders - immigrants, for example. Uncertainty must hinder the act of identification, which relies on inner certainty. Conclusion - hostility to a person means hostility to their art. You can’t wrench this back to objectivity. If identity politics is the central pattern, then the alternative poetry scene is completely wrong and has to disappear.
I am not aware of any actual text where someone claims that Underground poetry, by dint of its link with the New Left and so its ability to subvert capitalism and bourgeois values, is offering liberation to ethnic minorities. If that position exists, it has obvious flaws. First, the promise to overthrow bourgeois society has been devalued somewhat after 45 years of not being honoured. Secondly, I don’t understand why poets from ethnic minorities would desist from writing poetry on the grounds that the message had already been delivered by the stars of the Poetry Underground. This does not seem to claim that Underground poetry since 1972 has been unnecessary because the stars have already written the real story. I think the claim is more “because we are totally ignored outside a tiny niche we don’t have cultural power and so if you are angry about the cultural power structure we are not to blame and refuse to feel guilty anyway”. That is more plausible. Actually, it means that the scene had to disappear in order to become the Underground.
People want to say, “I changed the rules”. This is a pervasive fantasy, and the scene is largely made up of fantasies. This one needs the assumption that there are rules which everyone else is following. This may be wholly untrue. If 3000 people say, quite loudly, “I changed the rules”, it is easy to get the impression that the rules have changed. But, maybe they haven’t. Maybe another 20 people making a career doesn’t change any rules at all.
Weakness of empathy
Empathy and intuition are so much
the foundation of the poetry scene that to understand the way things happen we
have to offer a critique of them. They are partial, inefficient, spasmodic,
easily tired. They date back, as a form of knowledge, to the Palaeolithic, and
they are inaccurate. They are not particularly compatible with justice and
equality. The poetry world is all founded on the sovereignty of empathy. In the
end we have to draft a critique of empathy, it is too structural to the
landscape to be pushed behind a screen of awe and silence. Around the edge of
warmth we find the cold. Cold, cold, cold. There is a limit to how far you can
write about the poetry world under this ancient and feudal sovereignty without
stubbing your toe on the problems of empathy. It just isn’t going to reach the
outer fringes, and people are so happy to issue entire books which don’t
mention any Scottish or Welsh poets. You don’t want to go there, so why would
you want to read poems about there?
If I could dwell on one cell for
a longer moment, it is that the government officials may be less biased than
the individuals following empathy and subjective wishes. The scene may need
cold and indifferent governmental processes to balance its in-built favouritism
and loyalty and centricity.
What is justice?
If you look at the scene and
decide that (other) people make the right decisions only 5% of the time, that
might also mean that 95% of people disagree with you and that, really, this is
a measure of how different you are from other people. Suppose you belong to an
in-group which extends to 5% of the whole realm. That might be a little large
to enjoy the notorious benefits of being an in-group, preserving warmth and
loyalty. The wish for it to grow outwards and take over 100% of the territory
might be projective rather than the voice of reason and necessity. Could the
“picture” be described as blanking out the 95% of the realm that belongs to
other people? just not being interested by them and not recognising their right
to occupy territory and to make judgments? The majority of discourse directed
by poets boils down to an argument for their own work to get more love, fame,
admiration, attention, praise. This extends quite readily to similar arguments
in favour of their in-group. It is difficult to re-normalise these impassioned
and organic utterances of need to something that you could call public or
accountable or rational. And the unmediated cries of need just cancel each
other out. One poet is quite happy for another hundred poets to be cropped out
of the picture and have their microphone mysteriously go dead. The only way for
one faction to win and have their ideas become “official” is when the other
factions fall off the boat and can’t get heard.
Suppose we have 10,000 people [in
Britain] who have published at least one book of poetry. It may be more. This
is a large number. It is growing all the time. How can you take this number in
and still assert that everyone gets their little bit of fame, that there is a
slice of the pizza for everyone? It doesn’t stand up. But if it doesn’t stand
up, how can there be a basic situation of justice proportionately distributed
to everyone, so that deviations from that would show up as anomalies? where is
this basic situation situated?
There is a problem of defining
how much recognition anyone gets, much easier for dramatic incidents which
probably aren’t typical. Poets are obsessed by recognition but there are
several steps between burning resentment and an objective view of success &
reputation which would then be the basis for serious critique. Poets are
obsessed by praise and find it difficult to reach an objective view of it. How
much praise does any poet deserve? This is hard to agree about. And how much
exposure, praise, recognition does any particular poet get? In a poetry scene
which has 200 magazines, dozens of readings series, and an uncounted number of
Internet sites, it is demanding to count up how much recognition any individual
gets. This takes hard labour rather than just a feeling of need and being
rejected. How on earth do you measure if anyone gets more than they deserve? I
can see that if you start with an overwhelming feeling of Injustice, then
stopping to measure anything is just a waste of time, a bourgeois evasion of
Facts which everyone already knows. But the scene is so big. If you can’t
produce a convincing measure of two quantities, merit and reward, it is
doubtful then that you can assert that there is a disproportion between them.
Better research is called for, I think. A way of measuring recognition that has
objective results would be useful, even if it only applied to a finite subset
of the poets of interest. Counting reviews could yield interesting results,
although I don’t see anyone doing that. Surely we need a convincing measure of
the success of at least one poet, and a measure of their merit which is agreed
by different factions. Lacking that, it is hard to see how you can reasonably
scale up to talking about the degree of justice allotted to a hundred, or four
hundred, or a thousand, poets. I am suggesting that the work has not been done
and that intuition is not enough to propel public debate.
Is there any point to writing
about poetry unless to move towards justice?My problem with all this is that the transition to a scene where a few poets decide what is the proper way to behave and what is Wrong means that poetry readers are faced with a setup where they are being scored out of 10 for their ability to be poetry readers. I think this is incompatible with cultural freedom, pleasure, and volition. It is unable to happen but it is fraught with problems even in partial implementation. If you dislike the people who actually buy and read poetry, your ability to write something which pleases them is going to be severely abridged. The idea of the empirical bias is, among other things, that inherited prejudices and class solidarity are things you have cast off as outdated. The idea that culture is based on narcissistic acquisition of pleasurable sensations belongs to the suppressed zone and is consciously rejected by key players.
I think there is an underlying
metaphor based on the coming of American independence. This has several steps:
A naturally separate group exists
on a heroic frontierThey are spoken of and talked down by reactionaries at the centre who wear ridiculous clothes
You get hold of muskets and shoot your way out
You achieve autonomy and control vast amounts of territory
You expand into this territory, the population of which miraculously disappears
You are transformed by autonomy into maturity
This is really “what happened in
history” and it is hard to get away from. (That is, Anglo-American history.)
But it is unrealistic for ethnic minorities to address the mainstream cultural
market through these episodes. You can’t define the cultural realm as territory
without defining the cultural consumers on that territory as beings enfieffed
to your ideas and having to behave in a certain way laid down by you. The
metaphor has this implication, that “you are on our land and have to follow our
laws”. As a metaphor, it inevitably blocks an understanding of the cultural
market - where consumers do exactly what they want.
Shared scenarios
It’s pretty obvious that the most
prestigious poetry tends to be written by the people with the most formal
education, and within that group, even, by people closest to a sociocultural
norm of families with a long tradition of speaking English. The acquisition of
poetry-fertile qualities, that is, seems to start in early childhood rather
than, say, at age eighteen. Hardly less obviously, the people who ascribe this
prestige (i.e. successfully ascribe prestige, in contrast to rather large
numbers of people unsuccessfully ascribing it) themselves conform to this
pattern. There is a geographical factor (if we divide Western Europe into
subjectively cold and warm zones then it is obvious that peripheral areas are
relatively “cold” and that Wales and Scotland are less attractive as areas to
come from) but as American poets do not suffer from this it seems likely that
language use is very important. Poetry tests linguistic knowledge more deeply
than any other exercise, so it may be that the way in which the English
language is acquired is significant to what kind of poetry you write.
Because the educated classes
implicitly believe that what they embody is high skills at empathy and high
openness to individual merit, the idea that there are silent blocks against
people from immigrant families is massively unacceptable. Voicing it marks you
as a dissident. Ethically unacceptable might mean "intellectually
valid".
Writing a poem may involve use of
an inherited code which is of obvious complexity, although not so complex that
an individual brain cannot master it. This code is implicit and I am unable to
formulate it. It is acquired chiefly by reading messages written in it -
however, that may be an incomplete concept, as vital parts of the transmission
may happen during face to face interaction with older speakers. If you live far
away and know poetry only from books, the way you read the books may not be
enough to let you grasp the code. Eliot was preoccupied with the idea of this
Tradition; it has become deeply unfashionable among later strata of critics
(employed in an education industry which is instructed to deliver social
mobility and so to make tradition packageable) but this may inhibit them from
seeing what is actually going on.
A book called Ways of Sensing (by
Howe and Classen, 2014, the title is an allusion to Ways of Seeing)
talks about the symbolic forms of the Desana people: “In one image the human
brain … consists of layers of innumerable hexagonal honeycombs. … Each tiny
hexagonal container holds honey of a different color, flavor, odor, or texture
or it houses a different stage of larval development. … A brain can be seen as
a bouquet of flowers, a fluttering cluster of butterflies, a glistening swarm
of tiny tropical fish, or a quivering mass of multicolored frogs.” The coding
is described as arbitrary but stable - synaesthesia could form associations in
any direction. An initial freedom is exchanged for a later stability, and this
process is the formation of culture. The associations relate to experiences
while using a psychedelic drug from a plant called yage or ayahuasca. In this
people’s theory of sensory correlations “colours emanate from the light of the
Sun or Moon and then combine with heat to produce corresponding sets of odour and
flavours. Purple, for example, is said to come from the moon and is linked to a
rotten smell and acid flavour [.]”
If a culture has a stable coding
for an arbitrary set of associations, that argues for a process of destructive
coding. It is destructive because it wipes out other possibilities- it stays in
place and is recollected. This memorised quality is what makes it collective.
The destructive quality is what makes it specific to a culture, different from
the neighbouring tribe.
If we accept that very complex
codings are shared and at the basis of our collective culture, it becomes
obvious why an outsider would be reluctant to create cultural structures which
rely on that coding. Simultaneously we have the definition of an outsider (it’s
someone who has trouble with the coding). Because the code is complicated, it
is difficult to use and only a minority can create new assemblages of signs, as
opposite to participating in shared realisations of the completed sets. English
culture may be, to a much greater extent than we usually believe, based on
founding scenes which are remembered and repeated. People want to believe in their radical originality. That may not be a true idea- it may be much more true that they create within a universe of pre-existing symbolic relationships. So if an outsider creates something radically new because based on ignorance - it may fall flat. The English language is obviously a pre-existing set of relationships.
Another Desana image sees the
brain as “formed by a bundle of pencil-shaped hexagonal tourmaline crystals”
which produce sound waves. Woo!
Relatively few individuals who
have English as an additional language (code for immigrants, or rather from
immigrant families) publish poetry. This may well reflect a perception that
poetry has a close relationship with levels of the English language which are
incalculable and implicit and likely to make your efforts go wrong. Other
branches of art are less subject to invisible problems. Moreover, there is no
living to be made out of poetry. The situation may be comparable to demographic
patterns for barristers: there are now quite a few barristers from South Asian
or Caribbean backgrounds, although there were few in the 1960s. This may
parallel the pattern for poets. You don’t get to be a barrister by deciding in
the first place that the law is ridiculous.
Half a century ago, during the
education revolution which brought secondary and higher education to millions
of people from the working classes, the perceptions of these outsiders becoming
insiders were articulated very frequently and offer a description of the English
middle class and its mechanisms of defence. The cultural politics of the last
35 years (I mean roughly 1979 to 2015) have involved a consistent switching of
this kind of discourse to a branch line. It is not listened to and is
frequently described as boring. However, its validated results are likely to
explain the relationship between those other outsiders, the first or second
generation immigrants, and the culture around poetry. Giving right explanations
is not necessarily the way to gain prestige and popularity among the people
whose conduct you are explaining.
There may be a simplified
English, just as there is a simplified Welsh used by learners who acquire it as
a second language. It may be that this actually explains the phenomenon of dumbed-down
poetry, and that the work of several hundred poets fits into this category. It
is not likely to impress connoisseurs of poetry. The literary code, most
probably, was developed to make ambitious poetry possible. (The language of pop
lyrics may have a close relationship to this simplified poetry; and the lost
strata of language work more with the rational faculties than with the
affective ones.) Dance, and music, and clothes, may be easier to translate
across cultures than language. They are more detached from daily life and yet
less artificial. This may not be true for all forms of music (for example).
(The Desana material comes from
research by G Reichel-Dolmatoff.)
The definition of outsiders
raises the spectre of a group which already believes that they are the
outsiders and that they have overthrown every assumption of literature - along
with them, evidently, the prejudices of the middle class. But the market position
of this group suggests that they use an implicit and obscure code far more than
mainstream poets. In fact, that might be a way of defining their site. Their
texts are baffling to outsiders, and that includes the professional literary
critics of the day, paid to review them. The deletion of connectives made the
texts more subtle and open to possibilities, but also made them baffling and
frustrating. The claim to cultural openness does not match especially well with
an audience that has an amazing knowledge of the history of modernism and
critical theory. If it was open, wouldn’t there be an audience which has no
specialist knowledge, like most of the population?
The outsider franchise is
enclosed.
Resistance
If there are 2700 books of poetry
being published every year, which is what we are told, then evidently most of
them are going to disappear leaving almost no trace. Equally evidently, no
critic is going not read all 2700. [the figure comes from Randal Stevenson but may not be completely accurate as a count of "new poetry"] The decision about which books will survive
and reach “daylight” is made by experts on the basis of a prior filtering
process. Roughly, made by experts on a basis of ignorance. It is this filtering
process which we would have to reform, if reform is desirable. An individual
committed to poetry decides what to read on the basis of advice: other readers
push books towards them, whether this happens via anthologies, magazines,
reviews, bulletin boards, selecting poets for live readings, or simply personal
messages. This network involving humans and information is more important than
the dispositions of individuals. Its effect is to ensure the emergence into
daylight of a few books; the poets not selected are resentful about this, but the
alternative might be for no books at all to emerge into daylight. I spoke about
Allott’s anthology in terms of Allott, but this is unlikely to be fair, because
he was not an extremist, and his choices were undoubtedly suggested and
validated by a network of peers, in which he had participated between going up
to Oxford (in about 1932?) and 1960, when he finished the expanded, 1962,
edition of the anthology (originally 1950). The real object of study is the
network, not the individual. He was smooth, had allies, and was successful - so his personality just cannot be the issue.
I have interviewed quite a few
poets, and they often mention face to face interactions. That is, it’s all in
the books but you get to the books because you hang out with people who guide
you to them. If you get these experiences then you penetrate to the inside of it
all. Poets hang out with poets. It is private but not secret. The prevalence of
variants of the traditional code makes it even more difficult to write poetry.
It may be written up as freedom but actually it makes for more invisible rules
and more ways of being wrong. Actually, even if you get the books you may read
them in the wrong way. How do you acquire prestige among your peers? Well, it would seem that a history of past intelligent decisions is key. People are always disappointed when they discover that they don’t have peer prestige and that their recommendations of poets are in practice ignored. Eventually, the “shared map” stabilises, and some poets emerge as being part of the legacy (while others vanish). This is the collective effort of several cultural networks, and may reproduce the values of the network as well as those of the poetry. Individual critics only evaluated the poetry they read, and the major effect of prejudice was felt in the processes pre-deciding which books they read, not in the actual reading. Sigh. If you want to replace the network, what do you replace it with?
As this might imply, I think
close reading is the most desirable cultural tool. Everybody has a personality,
but few people can write poetry. We are interested in the poetry, not the
personality of someone we have never met. So it is valid to restrict everything
to examination of the texts. This is going to work well for people from ethnic
minorities who can actually write, and expose poets with rich in-group connections
who can’t write. Moreover, it is a focus which will push forward excellent
books based on their contents, and those books will reach library shelves and
so on complete with their content. The reader gets to read the poems, not to
take home a personality in a shopping bag. Close reading protects production
standards and improves the commodity which our business is producing. It didn’t
cause the shortcomings of Allott’s work, those shortcomings were injected at
several other stages of the reception process.
I believe that “we” now have an
effective map of what happened in the 1970s. I feel we are ready now to produce
an anthology of “British poetry 1960-90”, on the lines of Allott’s book. That
is not to say that such an anthology currently exists. It may be decades before
we have such a map of the period 2000-2015. The volume of poetry coming out is
just so huge. There was a 35 year delay in assimilating the material from the
1970s, when a maximum of 800 books were coming out annually.
Conclusion
I am not sure we have got
anywhere but I have to stop anyway. I am thinking about a dance where the
attendants mainly do know each other but come from several different groups,
perhaps several different schools, so the groups are strangers to each other.
If you let the individuals choose their partners, very little mixing will take
place. Actually, some people will not get to dance very much and some people
will be frustrated. If the people in control decide that there is going to be
formation dancing, not partners, then that issue can be made to vanish.
Everyone gets to dance a lot and everyone encounters strangers and has a kind
of intimacy with them, shared physical excitement and the mood evoked by the
music. Mixing takes place. So, we hear that particular publishers were told by
granting bodies, Publish more poets from ethnic minorities or you lose your
grant. This is not a public message so it may also be non-factual. I can’t
verify it. The result may well be that some books come out which their publisher
doesn’t like very much. The result might also be that individual inhibitions
and levels of cultural exhaustion are locked out of the decision process, and
what emerges is fairer. Mixing takes place. So I think this is the way to
direct the power of public funding. The in-group can expand and the “cultural
managers” can help it to expand. Also I think individual choice is influenced
by inhibitions, and needs pushing at certain points. Intimacy and inhibitions
are inseparable.
Postscript
This is not vital but is
interesting as gossip. Allott states in his Introduction that “It is a
representative collection of English verse written between 1918 and 1960.” This
cannot in fact be true - he was trying for the best poetry, not the average.
The inhibition about stating that was that he was, most probably, including
poetry which he did not like. This is an interesting fissure. Already then, an
expert was seeing personal preference as distinct from expertise. I think he
disliked some poems because he attacks them in his prose forewords, or
indictments, to each one. But also, there are clearly poems he does not
understand and is unwilling to give the seal of validation to. Thus on p. 390
we have him saying he can’t follow the Geoffrey Hill poems (‘Annunciations‘, 1
and 2) which he prints. “I can understand ‘Annunciations’ only in the sense
that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they
grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice) [.]“ Evidently he wrote to
Hill and said “Explain yourself“. And then he prints Hill’s explanations, which
we have to get through before reaching the poems. I think 1960 was about the
last time when a critic could say to a poet, What does this mean. It was the
1950s - and poets actually wanted to be understood. Advanced poetry has since
then plunged into an ocean of complete subjectivity. One effect of this was to
restrict the “audible realm” of the poem to an in-group and so to make the
power of the in-group, and centric effects, also complete and unrestricted.
It seems to me that such
inclusions are an example of Allott bowing to the wishes of the in-group when
they conflicted with his personal perceptions. That is admirable, but it points
to the next step, of inquiring who was in that in-group. The step after
that is to ask if its field of vision covered all of English poetry or just a
segment. But really, it was so easy in 1960. The number of poets around was so
small.
PPS
April
2016
Sandeep read this and says she
just doesn't accept "empathy fatigue": "I don't believe in
empathy fatigue as you do. I have yet to see real empathy in places where the
avant-garde exist." So this argument will go on. I think my personal
reference group CAN do empathy and is NOT the avant-garde. Yes, many people
regard empathy as "residual bourgeois humanism" and want it to be
stamped out of the poem.
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