C.J.Underwood and The Poets on Fire

The ‘Poetry Scene’ has always been a shifting thing, dependent on ephemeral projects that have come and gone, entirely dependent on the enthusiasms of those prepared to spend their time organizing them. In olden days, this mostly meant editing magazines or arranging readings but now that the internet is full of everybody, it has become the immediate way for communities of anyone who wants to be involved to involve themselves. As far as I can see, at the moment, one of the liveliest places to watch for poetry-related subjects is Jane Holland’s forum, ‘Poets on Fire’, here http://z11.invisionfree.com/Poets_On_Fire/index.php?showforum=15 . It’s this section on Contemporary British & Irish Poetry where most of it happens.
I’ve been looking at it for some time now and for a while it did seem like a place where a number of people met, each having a higher valuation of their own reputation than was really justified, but I’m glad to recommend this forum now to anyone with an interest in the frontline of contemporary English poetry as it has been going through a particularly good period and once you are familiar with the contributors, they are good fun.
Jane Holland is a poet, novelist, editor, translator and general poetry factotum who used to play snooker, who could be everybody’s favourite auntie, so committed to her art that she once spent a morning in bed writing poetry even though she was ill. Her coterie on this forum include Chris Hamilton-Emery, poet and publisher, editor of Salt and real insider of the poetry industry; Steven Waling is a prize-winning avant-garde poet, notable for not being limited by ‘mainstream’ ideas; other poets take part, like Rik Roots and Tom Chivers, but the estimable Roddy Lumsden appears regularly to ask an interesting question or add a dash of sanity. It is a fine mix of ideas and opinion, often more stimulating than you might think, which is illuminated by the considered musings of the poet, C.J. Underwood. And it has been Underwood more than any of the poets with more established credentials that has been bringing me back more and more to this forum in recent weeks.
Always succinct, and never allowing a moment of self doubt to cloud his aloof summary of any topic, his contributions to this forum have become one of the highlights of my internet week.
I was hoping to quote a wonderful exchange from a few weeks ago when C.J.
posted one of his dry dismissals of the topic under discussion at which Roddy finally lost his temper and asked which poets or poems C.J. actually liked because, as far as he remembered, C.J. had never said anything positive about anything on the forum. And Hats Off to Roddy, it needed to be said but since I can’t find it now I wonder if Jane has removed it. And if she has then it would be a polite and politically correct disgrace.
But, never mind, we are left with two recent worthwhile points. Tom Chivers said, in response to the question of what constitutes a ‘major’ poem, 'I'd make a case for Alice Oswald's Dart too', to which Roddy replied ‘go on, then’. And there was also the time when C.J. quite rightly disdained the idea of ‘schools, movements and manifestos’ but then immediately excepted ‘the surrealists and the futurists’. O, yes, those damnable futurists- they’ve been ruining our chances of classifying poetry, for whatever reasons we might have needed to, ever since they raised their weird futurist heads.
Poets on Fire is the place to go for anyone who wants to know whether Tim Turnbull is more significant than Daljit Nagra, but it’s better than that. The fact that I mostly go there now to read what C.J. Underwood thinks shouldn’t make you think any the less of it.