One might have thought that the weblog would turn out to be a recepticle for the unconsidered utterances of those not worthy of publication elsewhere. The ramblings of mad men, the cliches and non-sequiturs of any old misfit. I'm sure it is in places but I only find what I generally find using Clarissa Aykroyd's index of sites on her list at The Stone and the Star and she iis a good judge in the main.
Today, though, I was particularly impressed by some well-chosen words by Andy Humphrey at The Poet's Soapbox on Five Words that Poets Hate, which climaxes with 'poetry'.
This is by no means the first time I've raised the subject here but I'm encouraged to reprise the theme because however much it seems a major point to me - and what a luxury it is to have such an esooteric consideration as a pressing issue- things are ne'er so well expressed as when somebody else puts it better for you. There's a lot to like about Andy's attitudes elsewhere among his posts but whoever it was that replied to his survey, they have quite independently from me arrived at the same devoutly held belief.
The Poet's Soapbox, Five Words that Poets Hate
They do not begin, as I do, from the idea that 'poet' is not a proper job but was often in the past and is preferably still, an occasional and amateur enterprise undertaken by people who have other things to do, whether that be dramatist, Collector of Duties of Wool at London Port, Dean of St. Paul's or librarian. Novelist is also a 'proper job' because it takes all day to do it properly. It doesn't take all day every day for several years to produce a 60 page book of poems.
Ben Lerner's recent book, The Hatred of Poetry, came not from dislike of poems themselves but the feeling that poems can never achieve the sublime aims that generate them and that they can only fail. A less specific but wider discontent is how the job description of 'poet' brings with it pre-conceptions, some of it from Romanticism and daffodils if we need to cite an example, that many who write 'poetry' want to have very little to do with.
It's the words and how they are put together into the 'verbal construct' and a poem is no more than a piece of writing in which the author and not the typesetter decides where the lines end.
To come to poetry with any assumption that it is going to be profound, deeply felt, caring, sensitive, intelligent, moral, beautiful, uplifting or worthy is both to invite disappointment and undervalue many pieces of work that are not the slightest bit bothered about any of those pious sentiments. Certainly, many great poems can benefit from one or more of that list of aesthetic qualities but we didn't ought to think that they needed to.
It would be equally pertinent to say that 'poetry' is not by definition a good thing any more than football or dancing are always a guaranteed pleasure but everything has its moments. Thus many bad poems, and there are plenty of those to be found, suffer from the misconception that they are worthwhile because they aspired to, and possibly thought they achieved, one or some of those qualities. But that wouldn't be good enough if that was all the poem had done and had otherwise failed to 'be any good'.
And there's John Foggin, who was down here at Havant last year as a prizewinner at the festival, adding that 'poet is a word he runs from' although he definitely is one. However, there is no point imagining that the job or nomenclature are going to be revised. A poet is still going to be called a poet, like dustbinmen will be dustbinmen and prefer that to being refuse operatives. Poets- some of them idiosyncratic and the last people to want to sign up to any sort of identifiable image- will just have to say, 'yes, but not that sort of poet' and otherwise just sit and suffer. The greatest pity is when it is other poets that don't understand.
It's not easy but, not having remained a pop music fan until the Arctic Monkeys, I am still aware they had an album called Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. Perhaps one should take comfort in that.