Reviewers allocate much of their time identifying how the
poet under discussion establishes their own unique identity, their ‘voice’ and
often how they create the striking effects in their poems. It is about 100
years since Pound advised that poetry should ‘make it new’ and textbooks devote
themselves to explaining how it is desirable to shock and surprise, to see the
world in a new way, remake cliché or set up an expectation only to subvert it.
All of that is, on the face of it, fair enough but it isn’t long before that
becomes a new orthodoxy.
How many shocks and surprises can one take before one
becomes attuned to them, before the unexpected becomes predictable, before the
shock of the newness becomes cursory and mundane. After a long hour of reading
poetry, one would have become immune to such arcane fireworks. A novelty
doesn’t remain so for very long and the idea of novelty has a similar limit to
its uses. By all means, without stylistic innovation there would be no progress
and no interest whatsoever in any new writing but poets whose whole manifesto
is based on their perceived ground-breaking style are likely to be of brief
interest to all but their immediate circle of supporters. Even something as
clever as the ‘Martian’ poetry of the 1980’s began to seem old hat very quickly
which is not to say it isn’t worth reading any more, only that nobody seemed to
be writing like that by the mid 1990’s.
One simple maxim that does endure, though, is the avoidance
of bad practice, that is - bad stylistic practice. The shifting element within
that, of course, is what is regarded as bad practice from one decade, or less
than that, to the next. But the poems I find I most admire, having read a few
books in recent few years and made mention of them here, are those that do the
fewest things wrong and yet still remain memorable.
There are a number of readily identifiable traits that recur
in poetry that can make potentially good ones not quite so good- for example,
too much alliteration, gestures that are too grand, straining for effect and
modish affectation. In Donald Davie’s phrase, a poem is ‘a considered
utterance’ and so is not really a poem at all unless self-consciously
artificial. And so it is a sort of non-sequitur for a poem like Allen
Ginsberg’s Howl to affect to be a
spontaneous outpouring of an over-wrought sensibility when in fact he worked
very hard on it to make it appear so.
But, each poem succeeds or fails on its own terms and is only successful
when a reader has enjoyed it (even if the only reader that does so is its
author), and so each to their own and Ginsberg’s admirers are welcome to him.
Philip Larkin’s method is a case in point in the avoidance
of bad practice, having become a ‘plain style’ that eschewed such recently
bygone aberrations as Eliot’s high intellectualism, Auden’s political engagement
and Dylan Thomas’s wordy apocalyptic rhetoric. Larkin’s approach had a
cleansing effect, for those inclined to follow it, but in turn he was
immediately indicted by the next shift in fashion which saw him as genteel,
workmanlike and unambitious.
The first thing any poem needs to do is ‘be any good’ but
there is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and there is no need to
have a set of rules, of do’s and don’ts, and no manifesto to indicate how that
might be achieved. The ongoing dialectic between the establishment of new
principles and their immediate rebuttal is as useful as fashion. Adherence to
such agendas makes poems more easily dated. Personally, ‘making it new’,
achieving an individual ‘voice’ and seeing the world in a new way are perfectly
laudable things to have found one has done but one hasn’t automatically failed
if those targets haven’t been achieved.