Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Poetry is rubbish

Every quarter the Poetry Society sends me its Review magazine, showcasing the work of the nation’s top contemporary poets, and every quarter I go through it and think “crap, crap, crap, rubbish, rubbish, crap, rubbish, crap.” I suppose I ought to cancel the subscription, really.

In his notorious trashing of luvviedom and the accepted wisdom that theatre is something “the British do best”, the Yard wrote: “No, the British do poetry best, they merely do theatre a lot.”

He got that wrong. The British do pop music best, their poetry is almost entirely crap.

I don’t just refer to Sturgeon’s Law, whereby 90% of everything is crap, though that certainly applies; I mean that the whole game is rotten. Let’s get the handful of exceptions out the way: at the microscopic peak of the pyramid are Heaney, Hill, Ellis etc, (though even there one sometimes feels like saying “Oooh, la-dee-da, yes we’re all going to die and life is hard and we’ve lost touch with nature and history. Get over it, soft lad!”) and playing a slightly different game are the likes of Armitage and Cope who rescue the thing with humour or accessibility or satirical bite.

But between the peak of the pyramid and the vast base consisting of amateur scribblers and compulsive rhyme jockeys, are the professionals: the competition winners and collection-publishers. In other words, the British poetry ‘Scene’. And the Scene is crap.

The source of its crappiness is the stifling uniformity of tone. Prissily self-conscious, breathily earnest, knowingly wondering. Designed to be uttered in a halting semi-whisper by Juliet Stevenson to an audience of the kind of headscarf-wearers who laugh unnaturally loudly at certain Shakespeare lines to prove they get it, and then to be discussed with gesticulation-heavy intensity by the middling Newsnight Review panellists.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at it some time. Except you probably haven’t and won’t because hardly anybody does. Alex Turner and Amy Winehouse don’t count as poets because they’re far too good for the Poetry Scene. The technical side has disappeared up its own esoteric half-eye-rhyming posterior, so like modern opera it is an Unpopular Art, which makes it an impotent art, a failure. Topics are relentlessly re-peddled (language, losing touch with nature, middle-class angst).

Supply so far exceeds public demand for this stuff that the poets write not for the pleasure of the reader nor even, I imagine, for themselves but for the Scene, for the editors and judges. The consequence of this is a crippling self-awareness: look, I edited this poem until it was just obscure enough, see what I left unsaid! Observe my carefully-crafted last line: doesn’t it leave just the right amount

hanging?

20 comments:

  1. Nothing much good poetry wise has happened since the 1870s when WHERE THE DEAD MEN LIE by Barcroft Boake was written, but being an Aussie he probably does not count, but he was bipolar and committed suicide which is always a plus in luviedom circles.

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  2. Hoho - a lot of truth in that Brit - and much the same could be said of the 'literary fiction' scene I suspect. More about peer review (i.e. puffery and logrolling) than being read, let alone enjoyed. A closed circle of backscratching - or, to put it more crudely, one big circle jerk.

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  3. I did wonder if I'd gone a bit OTT but on review I think I was if anything too lenient.

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  4. Your back! thank goodness, how was conference, Sarah looked, sort of, well, you know.
    If you need to spleen vent then why not poetry, personally the emergence of R McGough and all of the scaffolding stuff was enough for us chickens back then.
    These days I have regressed back to that Shalott burd and the like (the audio book versions of course)

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  5. I've often thought we should just allow the poetry scene to die its death, so it might start again. People might then remember why poetry was (and can be) important.

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  6. Kingsnorth is going to loooove this

    v.well said by the way

    we had a section on poetry in my last creative writing class (I know, I know) and listening to the mangled, overly-emoted, weirdly innermost thoughts of my fellow students was one of the most excruciating things I've ever done. At the end of term the teacher asked many of them to submit their 'work' to various magazines. Those magazines must be staffed by chimps.

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  7. Oh God don't bring Kingsnorth into it, Worm, he already thinks we're obsessed with him. (His poetry does at least have a purpose, I certainly don't include him in the above).

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  8. Indeed. There's a lot of truth in your rant. If anything, it's worse than you say, because the word you didn't use that also describes the insularity of the Scene is the word "incestuous," which describes the numerous inner loopings in which scratching one poet's back gets yours scratched in return. The old boy's network of trading favors.

    I wish I could say the Poetry Scene (some call it PoetryWorld, more along the lines of a theme park) over in the USA, but it's just as bad, if not worse.

    Of course one reason no one outside the Scene reads or cares much about poetry is that poetry has turned, especially among its more technical or craft-oriented practitioners, so far away from having any connection to anything real, solid, or human, that there's nowhere for the average reader to get in. Of course poetry does take more work than prose fiction, to get into; or rather, people think it ought to be easy, when it does take a bit of work. Nonetheless it's gone too far down the road of academic hermeticism and obscurity for its own sake. It's become mannerist and baroque, so no wonder no one cares. Is there to be a revolution or other salvation? Perhaps. But I think it's more likely to be a quiet one, in which those folks over there disappear up their own arses while the rest of the world just goes on; and eventually new fertile corn will arise.

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  9. It seems poetry and the Poetry Scene are two entirely different animals.

    There are some great poets: The Beatles, Oingo Boingo, Brit, Pink Floyd, Bare Naked Ladies, Midge Ure, usw.

    As for the Poetry Scene, there is no shorter route to glazed over eyes.

    Why it is that poetry as lyrics is so much more compelling than poetry as scene is a real mystery.

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  10. "Why it is that poetry as lyrics is so much more compelling than poetry as scene is a real mystery."

    No, not really. It's because the music makes all the difference. The music synergizes with the lyrics to make something more than either are alone; which is the secret of great songwriting, after all.

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  11. Nice stuff, Brit; and no, I don't think you were too OTT. The unbearable "concreteness" of using devices like your "hanging?" here should be a, err, hanging offence. I agree with Sean, all poets should be bipolar and top themselves - if they're too lazy to go and die in a war, that is.

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  12. I intend to buy this cartoon for my poetic husband. Scenes you seldom see...http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=160405&which=&ViewArtistBy=online&aid=606151&wid=425958949&source=artist&rta=http://www.artnet.com/artist/606151/barry-fantoni.html

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  13. Heh heh - and note the headscarf, Sophie...

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  14. Strategic management scholars are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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  15. Beg pardon, David?

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  16. Yeah, that was more obscure than usual. I actually used that line in casual conversation a few weeks ago complaining about a listserv for management professors that I'm on. For the last year or so, professors on the list have been using the device of bemoaning our inability to teach our students to avoid the financial crisis to imply that management scholars rule the world.

    What does this have to do with the topic of the post? That's a very good question. Anyone?

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  17. I understand, David, it was such a good'un you had to let it loose somewhere.

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  18. I gave up writing poetry (mostly) when I realised that there's a maximum two-year gap between honing one to perfection and realising that it is excruciatingly awful. With prose a sense of progression is at least possible.

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  19. I Googled "Modern Poetry is Rubbish", and this was first out of 2.5 million. Spot on. The performance poetry scene has some interesting poets, but most of it (90%, I now believe) is just as bad. I even spewed some doggerel of my own about it: http://fergusthepoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/poetic-tough-love.html

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