Help if help were needed

 I'm a bit disconcerted to find I need to add a tag on here for Louis MacNeice after all  these years but I suppose he hasn't had many new books out recently.

The other day I hid away, at the bottom of some other inconsequential thoughts, some curmudgeonly objections to 'poetry' in the hope that nobody would read them but I could at least have said it.

But, the funeral baked meats soon furnished the marriage tables, and I'm glad to see Martyn Crucefix citing MacNeice when he, in a roundabout way, arrives at the conclusion that,

Hence all poems …  are ironic.

Which is wonderful news except I'd be the last person to want to make any sort of rules or law about what poems should be or do. And so what happens is that far superior poets like MacNeice and poets who take their vocation far more seriously than me put their name to ideas that I wouldn't insist on. But I'm glad of any support I can muster from the likes of them. It's here,

 

Crucefix on MacNeice

 

My reservations were about sincerity in poetry being one-dimensional. There's nothing especially wrong with sincerity but it's not very interesting. Some years ago I received an e-mail entitled Whatever People Say I am That's What I'm Not, which I quite liked, being so far out of pop music by then that I had no idea it was the title of an Arctic Monkeys album. But, yes, that's right. As soon as anybody ever wanted to typecast me as poet, sportsperson, student, vaguely leftist, pop or classical music enthusiast, I'd shift into one of the other modes. And that's irony.

This morning I did a couple of hours on the first section of Thom Gunn's Jack Straw's Castle towards my gruellingly workmanlike plod through (which means exhilarating, insightful critique of) all his work. I'm finding very much a sinister downside to the self-indulgent liberation he found in the fashionable hippy culture of the late 60's. For all the Summer of Love they said they had, for all the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Tiny Tim, there was a nightmare waiting to happen, which subsequently did. That wasn't quite as ironic as bloody inevitable.

Luckily, it also works the other way round and some of the libertarian grip that the West seemed hostage to with Trump, Dominic Cummings and the UK having the most clueless Prime Minister it's ever had answering their every command like an obedient spaniel, might not be quite as tight as it was. Heaven knows what long-term damage they've done and they refuse to go gracefully but whatever things look like, they often don't stay looking like it for long.

It's always the other thing. Poetry can say what it means if it wants to but can be much better if it implies it by saying something slightly different.