The Institutionalized Poet

Seeing again the BBC's compilation programmes of Poets in Their Own Words, from Eliot and Ezra up to Seamus Heaney, one was encouraged to see the role of 'poet' as that of the commentator commentating on the state of the world from their detached position of profound other-worldiness. It didn't entirely convince me, especially when it spent so much time on such 'confessional' poets as John Berryman and Anne Sexton who were so wrapped up in themselves that suicide was their only ultimate option. Also, Allen Ginsberg and the Liverpool Poets, the mildly amusing English Beat surrogates, indulging themselves with their cul-de-sac of populism. At least Sylvia was a great poet.

It made me think how Poetry has so often regarded itself as 'beyond' the ordinary world of commerce, business and accountancy but even Poets in Their Own Words revealed the bardic, inspirational Dylan Thomas as one who worked hard at his great flourish of wordiness and also only put on the poet's disposition in public. Otherwise he was 'normal'.

Having inadvertently spent time among the crowds on their way to Southsea's Victorious festival on Friday, I was alarmed at how un-alternative they were. I was more tempted to engage with an older person I saw this morning going back into his respectable terraced house with his missus in a Sham 69 t-shirt. And Glastonbury has long been so commodified that it has no resemblance to the first 1970 show with T. Rex and Stackridge or this extra-ordinary line-up from 1971- Hawkwind, Traffic, Melanie, David Bowie, Fairport Convention and Quintessence. The mainstream is too powerful, one has to be very determined to stay 'alternative' if you don't have to. Lemmy joined Hawkwind shortly before they recorded Silver Machine and left not much longer after but they'd been at no.3 in the charts, seen what difference a bit of cash coming in made and suddenly were no longer the darlings of the free festivals. And later there were a few versions of Hawkwind trading on the name.

There isn't much money in poetry and so poets are less likely to be tempted, as Aswad were, out of their rootsy convictions by a Top 10 hit, but commercial success is the enemy of artistic invention. Poets generally don't like to think of themselves as beholden to anything less than their muse. Above musicians and painters, whose disciplines demand technique and talent, poets are encouraged to believe in themselves as prophets, seers and sages, the angels of the ages but they are more derivative and institutionalized than any. I saw a rapper called Dave on telly last night, the massed audience at Reading, or maybe Leeds, chanting his unsubtle verses along with him. Irony might not have been a strategy his work foregrounds at the expense of immediacy.

When Larkin wrote Toads, he might have still thought that being a writer was a better job than having a proper job but he corrected himself in Toads Revisited. He preferred to be institutionalized by the proper job of librarian rather than finding himself the more deceived by adopting the role of full-time writer, performing at festivals, unveiling the mystique like a fiarground sideshow and doing all that is required of any other professional.

It's a fine thing when musicians, novelists or even painters can earn a living from their work but poetry managed to shunt its way into a dead end that denied itself the necessary audience. Poets are every bit as much poets as accountants are accountants or grocers are grocers except that accountants and grocers will be found out if they're no good at their jobs whereas with poets it doesn't make any difference to anybody else. They express their difference but so do all the others, and everybody else.

Larkin didn't get everything right. I'm sure he would have seen through Boris Johnson but I don't know whether his latent Thatcherism would have blinded him to the triteness of Liz Truss. What he did know, though, was that he was 'institutionalized' and that you can't help it. His mainstream, accessible, common sense poetry was, in its way, against the grain of the fashions he inherited but English poetry would have been worse off without him.