The Play's the Thing

The English poetry of recent decades has been defined by its major anthologies by a lack of definition. Motion and Morrison, Hulse, Kennedy and Morley and most lately Lumsden all more or less opted to describe the 'plurality' and 'diversity', the multi-cultural cross currents of the poetry and the fact that what the poets in each of their anthologies had in common was that they had nothing in common. They declined the opportunity to identify a prevailing style or put any idiom or school at the forefront of their perception of the brief periods they undertook to represent.

That's not wrong but it reserves judgement in a way that Alvarez didn't in his account of the 1950's poets. But future literary historians are unlikely to be satisfied with such a refusal to name, label and categorize. While we might enjoy the idea of an enterprising creative flux, it isn't always going to look like that with the benefit of hindsight and the winnowing of the reading list and the need some will feel to apply a more rigorous defintion to the late C20th and early C21st poetry.

I was looking back at Sean O'Brien's Firebox anthology this week, seeing how his biographical notes on the poets looked now, since they first appeared in 1998. He refers there to 'the age of Muldoon' without deliberately trying to attach the phrase to the time in an epoch-making way but it might prove to have been a starting place for more thoroughgoing attempts at writing the history.

These designations are nowhere near as useful as they seem and need to accept that not all they refer to adequately cover the poetry of the time. Not all the poems of the 1940's were Apocalyptic, as a paragon of sanity like Alun Lewis shows, and not all poetry of the 1950's was, or wanted to be, 'Movement' poetry. But since everything is in some way now post-Modern, and has been for some time, the Postmodernism of Muldoon offers a potentially useful place to group together poets that followed Hughes, Hill, Heaney and Sylvia Plath.

The element of Postmodern 'play' in Muldoon does not involve any suggestion of a loss of seriousness when he provides such monumental and memorable poems as Incantata, but he added, and continues to explore intrepidly, an ingenuity the like of which might not have been seen before. An early tributary to this method might be the Martianism of Craig Raine, whose own ingenuity was much admired in the 1980's before meandering into a cul-de-sac of its own making.

However, one could put such poets as Ciaran Carson, Don Paterson, Simon Armitage (never more so than in the prose poems in Seeing Stars), Roddy Lumsden and Glyn Maxwell into a similar class of playful language artists while recognizing that this generation was robbed far too soon of two contributors with the untimely deaths of Michael Donaghy and perhaps Mick Imlah. That makes it look like a boy's game, and it might even be that if Jo Shapcott and others can't be shown to belong to such a grouping . And so perhaps those separatists who seem to argue that 'women's poetry' is a different thing to the rest of it might actually have identified a discernable split. I don't want it to be true but if the male of the poetic species wants to play with their linguistic gadgets while their female counterparts concentrate more on emotional engagement, then there might yet be a identifiable difference where I had thought that nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and rhythms worked in exactly the same way whoever was using them.

So, it will be for a more accomplished critic than I that pins down a prevailing mode of Postmodern Play in recent English* poetry. History isn't properly written until a judicious amount of time has been allowed to elapse but I don't think the poetry of the latest fin de siecle is likely to be recorded as a period in which lots of different things went on.

Eventually, somebody's going to have a stab at saying what it was and others will then see that as a consensus opinion.

* I'm using the term 'English' here to refer to poetry written in the English language, by poets born in the British Isles or living there. It's a difficult area to draw a line round but it obviously doesn't include American poetry.