I tuned in specially to Radio 3 on Tuesday night under the misapprehension that a whole programme was going to be devoted to poetry.
Perhaps I should have known better. In fact, the last ten minutes were given over to an interview with the prize-winning poet whose book I had read with great pleasure and admired very much. But if I hadn't known which book they were talking about, I thought that there were long passages in the interview in which I would not have guessed or even that it wouldn't have mattered.
There is nowadays, and possibly it is a development of recent decades and the creative writing industry, a language that has developed for use in the discussion of poetry. It is characteristically recondite, seemingly moving away from the work under discussion rather than further into it, or possibly so far into it than one no longer sees what is actually there. It is not the poet's fault. For most of them their poems stand free of extraneous discussion, one might hope.
But most poetry reviewers are poets themselves and perhaps find it hard to resist use of their own bursting bag of words and ideas. Commentary and reviewing becomes a secondary art and I suspect one review is pressed to achieve finer perceptions, subtler appreciation and profounder insights than those that have gone before.
It is a trend. There is no particular reviewer I have in mind and so I will invent my own example,
Fennella Bloom's Seven Pieces in Memory of Jerome Badiewicz explore the space between their own shifting lexis and the contingent world.....the poet inhabits a lacuna in the shared consciousness of their community.
The reviewer sits back to admire their work, lights his or her pipe, and congratulates themself on some impressive sentence writing but one isn't always sure they have told you anything, whether it was specific to the poems in question or could have been said about virtually any poetry. It is a little bit precious. It might have been better if they had written a poem rather than a review. But I'm not looking for scapegoats and I don't suggest the practice should stop. It is an art form in itself and provides a mild entertainment for the reader as well as, I'm sure, a great sense of satisfaction for the author.
I would, though, suggest we don't need reviewers or any other commentator to provide us with rules about what poetry should be or do and what it shouldn't. Manifesto makers have always been with us and the recent tendency has been to make lists of do's and don'ts, often perilously or even patronizingly aimed at aspiring poets.
The latest one I saw was hardly an original idea- that poetry should surprise the reader. We know about foregrounding, the disruption of a pattern and all such rules, how effective onomatopeia, assonance and alliteration can be.
But a collection of poems might consist of 60 pages. Does the reader expect to be surprised on every page and, if they have been surprised on 58 pages, are they still surprised to be surprised on page 59. Or would it be a surprise if page 59 contained no surprises. Perhaps every next word is a surprise in itself or perhaps my own threshold of surprise is morbidly high.
But please don't make up rules like that if you can help it. Each new poem succeeds or fails on its own terms. It might be acutely aware of every poem that ever came before it or it might not know anything about any of them.
Which rather conveniently brings me to the one rule that could be introduced. Not so much a rule but a law or a decree. And this time I do have specific offenders in mind but it is the same ones as it usually is. Anyone who needs to distinguish between a mainstream and something other than mainstream should be banished to an island where they can all celebrate their cherished novelty with like-minded others. It will be like Whicker Island, or the existentialists in Tony Hancock's film The Rebel, or like it was at university in 1978 where everyone expressed their individuality by wearing the same denim jeans. Meanwhile, back on the mainland, in the mainstream, everybody else can accept that diversity means that we are all in a minority of one, that individuality is something that one is born with and doesn't need to be worked at. Anybody who needs to insist on their own difference is trying too hard.
There is no need to invent a new language. The ones we have already work very well. They are a constant source of amusement and interest. You can even write poems with them.