Reasons to be Disenchanted, part 1

 It seems a great shame, or even bad form, to be immediately following up yet another celebration of music with grizzly comment on poetry but I'm always glad when someone far better than a grisly low-voltage ne'er-do well like me finally puts into words what I've been thinking for a long time.

Matthew Stewart at Rogue Strands is to be thanked for highlighting this frank summation of the poetry industry, such as it is, by Rory Waterman from Poetry London,

Rory Waterman in Poetry London.

So it wasn't just me who was thinking such things, then. I can call myself Disenchanted because I have been enchanted by poetry, not all of it but plenty of it, ever since I can remember. That was why I wanted to do it. Like football, cricket, cycling and pop music, one saw something one admired and wanted to have a go at it oneself and so did, with varying degrees of success. 

But what Rory diagnoses is what it's like now, increasingly so or maybe it was always thus but one was too enthralled to notice. It's precious, it seems to go unquestioned that the poet, who is self-appointed, is something of importance and must be treated as such. It's possible that nobody is prepared to point out that it's the king's new clothes all over again in case they seem disrespectful or somebody somewhere might decide that their efforts are no good, either.

A sceptic friend once estimated that 90%, I think it was, it might have been 95%, of poetry was 'no good'. And a much-admired, now sadly departed, eminent poet once told me I was a harsh critic. I wasn't entirely surprised by that but consoled myself later with my own reasons.

10/10 needs to be reserved for those very few almost life-changing things if it's ever awarded at all.

9/10  is sensational.

8/10  is great and needs to be on one's shelves.

7/10 is also likely to be on one's shelves because it's good.

6/10 is nothing to be ashamed of.

There's plenty of 5/10 it's not a waste of time reading.

But there's a lot of 4/10 out there, and worse.

If you pretend everything is at least 9/10, it makes a nonsense of 'critical judgement'. It denies there is such a vast gap between The Spice Girls, perfectly okay at what they did, and Diana Ross & the Supremes, whose name was on some of the best pop records ever made, by a consummately expert hit factory.

 

I always wondered what it would be like to find one's life's work had come to nothing. Luckily poetry wasn't my life's work and there's plenty I still like about what I did. But I do feel a bit like an evangelist who eventually realized there is no god, a devoted football supporter who realizes that their club was not really their club but a business of which they were a paying customer or a comedian whose jokes are found by subsequent generations to be unacceptable when once they had them rolling in the aisles with stories about mothers-in-law or demographic minorities.

There's still a chance paradise might be regained but it can only be regained by deleting out even more of the things I don't want to do. It's long been a process of trying to avoid bad practice. Whether there's anything left once one's done that remains to be seen.