The Intentional Fallacy Fallacy

At university, 40+ years ago, we were very much 'educated' that the study of literature was the study of texts. The 'Intentional Fallacy' by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley was 'gospel' and, it seemed to me, propounded by the work of Lancaster's then highly fashionable tutors on the Stylistics and Criticism course, Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short. Their book was the set text for the course. Why wouldn't it be if that's what you were teaching and they could sell a copy to every student that signed up for it.

I tended to believe what teachers told me. Giving them back in essays the ideas that they had provided seemed the safest way of achieving passable marks. Having understood that a liberal, humanities education in the 1970's showed one 'how to think' and not 'what to think', we'd like to think, my doubts that it really did have accumulated ever since.

It wasn't only in The History Man, filmed at Lancaster on a suitably contemporary shopping precinct of a campus, that there was a given way of thinking, it existed in the predominantly Marxist Sociology Dept. there in the slightly less fictional world and in the Linguistics Dept., too.

I've not had much sight of what constitutes university education since then but it's possible that the education is delivered more than offered with concomitant 'correctness' advisable in exchange for a good grades.

I was taken aback ( ! ) at a conference in 1997 when presented with the proposition that the Intentional Fallacy, that the reader should not refer back to anything the author intended, was nonsense.

But, surely...the Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, the text.

No. I just went quiet.

 

Following up Anna Karenina with the great A. N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, of course you can't have the text without the life of the author it came from. Texts can't possibly be free-floating things that just happened. They came from a time and place and an author. That much has been apparent for quite some time but not often as clearly as it is in the case of Tolstoy. How far that should lead us into investigating the author and all their darkest corners is another matter because we are still reading the text rather than them but the idea that it exists in suspended isolation is absurd.

'Education' is a good thing, I'm sure, but for me carries the overtones that 're-education' in totalitarian states did and still does. In the same way that saying, 'I'm sure', implies some equivocation. All it can do is present you with what seems right at the time. One has to spend the rest of one's life unlearning what one was taught.

Collating the Collected Poems has shown me how I very gradually unlearnt what a poem ought to be like.

Universities have Theology Departments that train potential vicars, presumably predicated on the idea that there is a Christian God. Still. In this day and age. In some ways we are still medieval.

For all we know, in a phrase from Shirley Bassey, we congratulate ourselves on being wise by escaping one fallacy but only to potentially land ourselves in another. That might not be quite what Tolstoy meant but that's what I'm getting out of him. Maybe it's that condition that makes us 'human', for better or worse.

Maybe Carol Ann Duffy had more of a point than I thought she had in her 'poetry is the music of being human'. It first sounded to me like the most vacuous, self-congratulatory defintion one could provide in support of one's own position in a minor industry but, no. If and when poetry tries to come to terms with being human and succeeds in making music out of it, that's what it must be.

What is Poetry

There might not be much new in this that hasn't been co-opted by me before but the opportunity arises again from behind-the-scenes discussions and another of my several truisms is that poets repeat themselves more after the age of 60, so I'm allowed to.

Reduced to about 1500 words, it just about fits in here. I'd like to find a better title for it and will return to amend that if and when I do. The definition might be underwhelming to those who think 'poetry' is surely more than that but not all defintions are as good as the one I once found of 'kangaroo' that said it was an antipodean marsupial that proceeded in a series of flying bounds. 

I am increasingly persuaded by the implicit suggestion that poetry might be beyond us or a figment of our imagination by the aside in Sean O'Brien's novel, 'Afterlife', in which the tragic superstar poet of her generation, Jane Jarmain, is said to be writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible' which I'm glad to be able to recycle again now.

So, to complete my full repertoire of poetry catchphrases, which is also lifted from elsewhere - All you have to be is any good.

--

My first meeting with the local poetry group here was in 1982. I’ve been a casual member with varying levels of attendance or excuses not to ever since. I’d seen it listed on their programme and the subject, What is Poetry?, was very much the sort of subject I’d have enjoyed at university where I’d finished the year before, the Aesthetics course with Colin Lyas having been a favourite.

The discussion was well-intentioned with dictionary definitions about ‘craft’, the idea of it being a ‘heightened form of language’, use of metaphor, alliteration and rhyme until eventually someone read some Byron and compared it with some T.S. Eliot, the implication being that Byron was poetry and Eliot wasn’t. I sat quietly and listened, not wanting to sound either too clever or say anything too opinionated among people I didn’t know, but, when the opportunity arose at the end, as a sort of summing up, I observed that much of what had been said related to the difference between good poetry and bad rather than what was poetry and what was not. 

It’s not a pejorative term that confers approval. Poetry can be bad as well as good and much of it is. Poetry can’t be assumed to be innately a good thing. 

At the time my own definition might have been that a poem was a ‘verbal construct’, which it usually is, but so is anything else made of words and so it doesn’t serve the function of delineating poetry from other writing. 

I can’t now remember how many of the pronouncements on the subject made by famous poets were quoted, if any.

Aristotle is a good place to start, whose digressions are a bit long for inclusion in a dictionary, 

Aristotle 

Certainly, poetry doesn’t have to deal with actual things but it can if it wants to. Had he known about photography, he might have compared it with painting and said that poetry is like painting in that it imbues its subject with something of the artist’s feelings about it.

In no particular order, Wordsworth’s verdict was that, 

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Shelley considered poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’; Coleridge has, ‘Poetry; the best words in the best order’, Auden offers ‘memorable speech’, Carl Sandburg says, 

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. 

Which is more like a poem than a definition of one.

I’m glad I’m checking these as I go because I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that it was Ezra Pound that said ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’, which is one of the more useful contributions, but it was Robert Frost. Pound’s ‘poetry is news that stays news’ isn’t quite so good.

Most of these are manifestos, agendas or aspirations, promoting each poet’s methods or sympathies rather than a definition that could be used to decide if any given specimen was poetry or not. A definition of a house will ensure we don’t confuse that which is a house with an apartment, an office block or a kangaroo. Poetry, or ‘a poem’, needs to be defined equally accurately.

Since many of those definitions were attempted, poetry and many other things have been through Modernism and the Avant Garde which the likes of Aristotle, in all fairness to him, couldn’t have been expected to foresee. One thing we have to be able to contain is the inevitability of the ever-readiness of an endless supply of self-styled mavericks to overturn whatever definition is put in place just because they can. Concrete poetry consisted of sound sometimes rather than words, like the Konkrete Kantikle that includes ‘number poems’ that is so rare that when I google it I’m referred back to my own website and every few months I still search the archives upstairs hoping to find the late 70’s magazine that had Michael Daugherty’s concrete poems that consisted entirely of punctuation.

It’s not going to be me that says any such thing isn’t poetry. I wasn’t quite 10 when Marcel Duchamp died but I was 32 when John Cage did. The likes of them, and Yoko Ono, were significant contributors to our perceptions of what was what in my formative years and so it’s not for me to say, as I heard said in meetings many years later, that poetry should rhyme. 

Homer doesn’t; Ovid doesn’t. They concern themselves much more with scansion, that poets blinder than Homer might have subsequently abandoned at their peril.

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘poetry is the music of being human’ sounded a bit like what those dreamy Romantic giants of two hundred years previous had said and can’t be made to mean very much at all. Poetry would be something of a luxury for millions and being human doesn’t sound like that to them in the same way that it does to Poet Laureates and Professors of Creative Writing.

We have to allow poetry to be all and everything it wants to be or thinks it is and then dismiss it as bad poetry if need be. 

In one Philosophy seminar at university, 40 years ago now, Colin Lyas asked on what grounds we could believe what he was telling us and I suggested that he was a lecturer and we were students and so we should be able to believe him. This ‘argument from authority’, or argumentum ad verecundiam, was readily accepted, possibly because it was in the Philosophy Dept of a lowly-rated university (then) as part of a liberal humanities education that meant well but the argumentum ad verecundiam is clearly a fallacy post-Trump, during Boris Johnson and long after even worse travesties. But, at my own risk, I will use as a potentially treacherous stepping stone, a definition of poetry given by Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Literary Theory, who rose from the backstreets of Salford to become Professor at both Oxford and Cambridge before taking an Emeritus job at Lancaster.

In his book, How to Read a Poem, Prof. Eagleton, who has had a long time to arrive at his preferred form of words, delivers,

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

It’s at the start of Chapter 2, here,

Eagleton, How to Read a Poem 

But in the same way that Aristotle didn’t need to make the point that poetry doesn’t have to be true, neither should Prof. Eagleton assert that it is ‘fictional’. It doesn’t seem right for me to be telling them they’re both wrong but it is ostensibly the fact that some poems are entirely true. And so we need to delete ‘fictional’ from the quotation above.

While it is surely desirable for a poem to be ‘verbally inventive’, not all of them are. Many are cliché-ridden and steadfastly refuse to do anything original. I wouldn’t want to name any names but I could find any number of poems, or even poets, in magazines that have never done anything verbally inventive even if they thought they had. They are bad poems but that doesn’t mean they’re not poems. So we can’t allow that. 

And why would a poem need to be ‘moral’ to qualify as a poem. It must be possible for a poem to be immoral. I have the Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, within arm’s reach here. It might be a matter of opinion but many ethical traditions would struggle to accept them as ‘moral’. 

I’m going to have to accept that a poem is a ‘statement’ in order to retain any sense in the sentence but, yes, it is stated and so it’s a statement. Donald Davie distinguished between poems as ‘considered utterance’ or ‘unconsidered utterance’ and only now does it occur to me to ask whether he meant it was the poet or the reader that did the considering but surely it is ‘considered’ by the author who has considered various options - one might hope - before deciding on their form of words and it is considered by any reader in the act of reading. It can become disarmingly straightforward to break down some of these questions. 

What we are left with, having removed the extraneous bits is,

A poem is a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

And, thus, poetry is the language used in writing such a thing.   

There is still the ‘prose poem’, which is a thing whether it’s a tautology or not. The idea of what was ‘poetry’ or ‘a poem’ had taken off in all sorts of directions long before the prose poem came about which might have been in France in the C19th. All the ‘prose poem’ does is abnegate its claim to being a poem by admitting that it’s prose. It’s a very French, or possibly Belgian, idea like René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. That is not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. A prose poem is not a poem because it’s prose. But it’s also a poem because it says it is.

Superglue and other stories

Oh, Dear Me. That was a disastrous decision to play in a chess tournaament this afternoon. P9 W2 D1 L6 but not costing too much on the ratings because I played against some fairly sharp know-how. But one learns to lose gracefully. Or try to think of consolations.

Like this week's successes with Superglue. I hope I'm not celebrating too soon.

First of all I noticed a power point had come out of the wall in the kitchen. The whole fabric of the house disintegrates sua sponte, of its own accord, over the years and has to be maintained. Unfortunately I'm not a practical man. I can, and might well, season sundry pieces of no consequence like this with subliminal or passing references to Ovid or Carol Ann Duffy but my modest roll of honour of poetry-related prizes far outweighs those I have for tradesmanship one or two to nil.

I gaze aghast at anything that needs fixing and calculate the possible outcomes of a) leaving it be, b) have a go myself and see or c) think about ringing up someone with the requisite expertise and then go back to a). But on this occasion I considered the option of Superglue and, to cut this part of a mundane story short, it worked very well.

But the way Superglue works reminded me somehow of Carol Ann Duffy's Mrs. Midas and how turning everything one touches into gold is more than one really wants of having a wish granted. Do you know about Superglue? It feeds no one; clear, viscous, undiscriminating. It doesn't know when to stop sticking everything to everything else. Fingers to the tube it comes in; things to other things one doesn't want them to be stuck to.

In the same way that Ms. Duffy's Midas finds himself in a nightmare world of useless, dead gold, I imagined the house eventually locked down, locked tight, by a virulent plague of very effective glue. But there's no point in using glue that doesn't work. I could see nearly 2000 books becoming merely ornamental, their pages stuck together and the books all stuck to each other and the shelves, a CD of Buxtehude stuck unplayable in the CD Player, my pens stuck to the backs of envelopes halfway through notes on Thom Gunn books or, less likely, a new poem trapped mid word. I could see my finger, this same old finger that has typed every word I've ever put into a computer, stuck on one letter, aaaaaaaa, like that.

What I don't understand, being very bad at science, is how such strong glue can ever get out of the tube since if it's that sticky it would surely stick to itself. They must put an enzyme or anti-coagulant in it because, as we have seen recently, science is clever enough if left to its own devices. But so far, so good. Being uncomprehending of how the world works threatens to turn one into a 'man of faith', believing in things for no good reason. God Forbid. See what I mean. But as far as we can we must trust one another or die before changing our minds and realizing that we must trust one another and die eventually anyway.

But from my accustomed supine reading position in the front room, the first thing always when looking away from the book is the curtain rail which has detaching itself from the ceiling ever since probably Beowulf. Chronically I have been up the steps to shove it back in, tried Blu-Tack, Uhu and swear words but lived with the situation until this morning when I looked at it again, thought of the other tube of Superglue and, well, if fingers are crossed for various horses pounding their way round a glorious part of Gloucestershire next week, they include the future of the curtain rail in their thoughts.

-

One thing leads to another, though, doesn't it, in reading and all things arty. Classic FM have, or had, a programme based on 'if you like this, then you should try that'. Gramophone has a similar feature more ambitiously offering family trees of other works related to a central piece under consideration. They might help but I prefer to do it for myself.

I don't know if my first experience of it was realizing the debt D.H. Lawrence's novels owed to Hardy's before his 'influence' perhaps brought forth Stan Barstow and Alan Sillitoe. I was aware that Roger McGough might not have happened as he did without e.e. cummings. And Dubliners needed George Moore and Turgenev before Joyce's legacy led Beckett to a dead end down one way but William Trevor took it gently down a more sustainable route.

The network of links that I've followed up from the starting point of Thom Gunn has provided all kinds of interest, some of which became favourites in their own right- Fulke Greville, August Kleinzahler, Mina Loy. Not quite so much all of the others.  

But, such as it is, having been lent the letters between Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson some months ago, I've very much enjoyed some Vita novels on the back of them and now, coming towards the end of The Edwardians, I see an advert in the back for her friend, Violet Trefusis. These are not quite the outrageously privileged, self-indulgent equivalents of our contemporary Conservative leaders. By all means they were outrageously privileged and self-indulgent but they understood themselves better. I might not want to defend what I know about Virginia too far beyond her brilliant writing but Vita's been great and Violet might be, too, so might be next. It's a different world and that is one of the things reading can provide. Proper, good, worthwhile reading. I don't mean Science Fiction.

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.  

Best Poem and Best Collection 2018

The Year In Review

I think we can put this away now, with enough evidence to decide on these minor, minor, minor awards.
We will start with the little extra categories that have grown up around the poetry over the last 10 years.
The Best Event can be picked from a long and impressive shortlist of concerts that includes The Tallis Scholars, who only have to turn up to be considered; Sophie Gent, Trevor Pinnock and friends playing Buxtehude et al at Wigmore Hall; Steven Kovacevich in Chichester Cathedral, and there was plenty more.
With so much top quality live music to pick from, it seems wrong to select a television programme but A Very English Scandal, one of the few political programmes this year not about the referendum fallout although the title fits, and a masterpiece from Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, a deep cast of excellent minor characters, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Frears and an absolute very, very, very great success.
The Best Novel can't be the re-issue of Monday Morning by Patrick Hamilton because that was first published in 1925.
Killing Commendatore is engaging but not quite Murakami's best so The Only Story by Julian Barnes doesn't have anything to beat because too many - Seb Faulks, William Boyd, Sally Rooney's much-vaunted Normal People - haven't got as far as being read here. Barnes might brood a little longer than he might but it is profound and true and all it needs to be.
Best Record is a potentially competitive division and the Belcea Quartet with their Shostakovich would have been a worthy winner before the Buxtehude Abendmusik by Vox Luminis, wisely programming the best Trio Sonata where Gent/Pinnock made the next best suffice.  It is, indeed, luminous, is preferred in many ways to the Opera Omnia accounts by Ton Koopman, which are wonderful enough in their own right, and I was very glad to find two of Gramophone's expert reviewers chiming in to make it the only disc selected by more than one person in their survey.

And so, to the poetry, which hasn't been decided yet but will have been by the end of a few more short paragraphs.
It looked for a long time as if Sean O'Brien had the game to himself with his collection, Europa, and the poem, Goddess, within it. I don't read as much new poetry as I did a few years ago and don't find as many titles that I want to buy as I did.
But then Carol Ann Duffy's Sincerity appeared, entirely convincing as a book if without such a stand-out individual poem.
But then, I was glad to find out about Derek Mahon's Against the Clock just in time, with several great poems in it, among which Stardust is the pick.
Let me just take a minute to re-read Goddess v. Stardust. I honestly don't really believe in competitions or even prizes, only having won a small handful myself, but once we hear ourselves say one thing is good and another isn't, we are halfway to doing it anyway.
....
The quick reminder of Goddess by Sean O'Brien is more than enough to make it far and away Best Poem which means that no horse trading is necessary to make Against the Clock by Derek Mahon the year's Best Collection, from the narrow sample of new poetry I've read this year.

And, because the sample is so narrow, it might be time to call an end to any pretence I might have that me naming anything as portentous in poetry and perhaps next year I might just do The Year In Review, from my own very limited perspective.

Always grateful for anything less than chaos

Although how I was expected to get Lope de Vega and 'neonate' in Saturday's Times crossword, I don't know. But I did, with a little help from my friend, the internet.

A few weeks ago, an e-mail questionnaire arrived from Virgin media asking in no uncertain terms 'what is the most we could charge you without you leaving us'. Not bloody much was the answer since my 12-months fixed price had already been put up, which brings into question their definition of 'fixed'.
I have since, though, found channel 198, which is You Tube. Yes, I have the internet on the computer and I dare say with the right wires that could be displayed on the telly but I won't be bothering to do that. But what I can do now is type in Mozart Piano Sonatas and there are five hours plus-worth of the whole shebang to accompany, quite fittingly, reading Murakami. Haydn Piano Trios have made for good company, too, but this does threaten the future of the CD.
Why would one buy such music when it can be whistled up for free. Well, because one still wants to, I hope, but it is almost the paradise one dreamed of aged about 13. Just about all the music you can think of in one convenient machine, from obscure 70's long-hairs like Alquin or Jack the Lad to Josquin Des Prez, Pergolesi and, looked up following the feature in Gramophone, a quite glorious La Cenerentola by Rossini, which needs to be watched, not just listened to.
But, no, Virgin, I'll keep paying but I've only just dragged myself into turf investment profit for the year and I don't intend to have earned it just to pass it on to you.
--

Although, still with Gramophone, I am waiting for Cappella Amsterdam's Josquin- Motets and Deplorations in the hope of finding anything to compare with the lament on the death of Ockeghem, I was most gratified to find the only disc to be nominated more than once as their disc of the year by their reviewers (by Lindsay Kemp and David Vickers) was the Vox Luminis/Buxtehude Abendmusik, which is imminently expected to see off the Belcea Quartet's wonderful Shostakovich and all other comers to be mine, too. I'm not sure if Gramophone's reputation is enhanced by this coalescence of opinion, or mine. But I don't believe in coincidences.
--
More than halfway through Killing Commendatore by now, I am looking forward to reading some short books, this having followed Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, but fear Larkin's letters to his mother and a biography of Tennyson coming at Christmas won't be those. I'm wondering if I can see off Saturday Night at the Greyhound by John Hampson in my spare time.

The Gallery Press have promptly furnished my order for the belatedly-discovered Against the Clock by Derek Mahon, taking the loving care to not only use a jiffy bag but wrap it very neatly in brown paper within. It is an indication of the care some sellers take over their product and reminds me of once, in the late 80's in Winchester, buying a local magazine of poems and short stories for a couple of quid and watching in awe as the vendor did the same, like a sommelier decanting a bottle of Pauillac. But it means that the O'Brien walkover in the year's poetry awards, with Duffy and Mahon to make a game of it, is no done deal. And, with Murakami and Josquin to review before Christmas, the awards might have to wait until the new year. We will see.

That shortlist, however, does reflect back on the recurrent discussion of what a state contemporary poetry is in.
It might not be for the likes of Jeremy Paxman or even Stephen Fry to say so but others have been saying so, too. And I'm sure it has ever been thus.
My shortlist of O'Brien, Duffy and probably Mahon represents my age group, being someone whose pop music doesn't penetrate far into the C21st and whose radio listening consists of R3, R5, I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue on R4 and Johnnie Walker on R2.
It is possible that, for poets and poetry readers (if there is any difference) under 40, there are young poets that represent a new golden age and it's not for me to say they don't any more than I'd prefer the hit parade to still be full of T. Rex and Tamla Motown.
Time often does us no favours but I will be amazed if any new poet, or pop artist, turns up between now and kingdom come that does it for me like the old ones did.
Poetry does not look to me to be in a healthy condition but I remember objecting profoundly in a first year seminar when a young lecturer announced in 1979 we wouldn't be reading anything after Auden and promptly went to the admin office, claimed to have a timetable clash with a philosophy lecture and changed my seminar group.
We've all been there, what goes round comes around, etc. 

Carol Ann Duffy - Sincerity

Carol Ann Duffy, Sincerity (Picador)
 

I don't think this is the first of Carol Ann Duffy's books to advertise its unique selling point of 'Poet Laureate' on the front cover. I imagine that it is thought it will sell a few more copies that way but it hasn't always been a recommendation given some of the dubious literary reputations of some on that roll of honour. The honour such as it is might be better worn as David Gower was once said to wear the England cricket captaincy, 'like a casual, off-the-shoulder number'. It is the last volume that Ms. Duffy will be enabled to advertise as such before Mr. Armitage inherits it but she has been a fine 'ambassador', both for poetry and us, her subjects, as she continues to do what she does, like she's always done it.
Sincerity wouldn't be the first thing I want from poetry, either. Surely we are all ironic, detached and far too clever for sincerity by now but, again, this was a rare example of a book of poems that I opened, began at page 1 and read in order to the end. It worked. I can't remember the last time I did that or even if I've actually ever done it before. So, perhaps sincerity is due a recall. Maybe the smartarse who elusively never really means what they say, but we are supposed to realize that, has finally had their day.
But Carol Ann Duffy remains entirely accessible, moving at times, committed to her causes, capable of producing gorgeous moments and, yes, she is here just about 'at the height of her powers' if we can bet without her reading Mrs. Midas to us many years ago.

The book begins with the poet newly bereft, her daughter having left home and there is,
read by sunlight, an open book on the floor.

A good joke is worth recycling, and, like Handel adjusting an aria from a previous opera to fit new purposes, Mrs. Darwin, from The World's Wife, shows up again as Gorilla, that ends,
With a day's more evolution, it could be President.
But she may have blundered there, even if with the best of intentions. If more had been less there, she might have shown more respect for very honourable gorillas and nailed Donald Trump more accurately but we know what she means.
In simply a list, but a rhyming list, of entirely fitting epithets for the Leader of the Western World, in Swearing In, by far my favourite, which did actually make me LOL, he is, among all the other things he most ostensibly is, a
golf-plonker,

a rich phrase that combines all the futile, self-absorbed culture of golf, the President's need to be seen doing it and all that it implies, much more subtly than such equally true but less entrancing terms, like 'tweet-twat', but I intend to read it as a bonus to my small but select audience on Wednesday.
But laugh is all we do, because we know. It might be therapeutic to write it, and it makes one glad she was our appointed laureate if somehow she wrote it on our behalf but she's preaching to the converted, the poem won't change one vote in Iowa in the current election campaign and, however well they are done, political poems don't work for me if political is all they are. Golf-plonker, however, gets an award all of its own and was worth the price of the book without the rest of the very good things in it.
Those poems rhyme signficantly with memories of tawdry machismo in anecdotes from family life. And, yes, feminism has a very good point when blokes are like that. I can't apologize enough for them. Tough guys like Tony Harrison and Sean O'Brien have made similar points so I don't regard it as entirely a gender issue. Some might find the shrill advocacy of purely 'women's issues' as almost a counter-balance but Ms. Duffy has the balance right.

Scarce Seven Hours is a brilliant set of four short pieces on desolation that begins with taking the much-loved dog to the vet's for the last time and develops towards,
Whose bad idea was language? It is a veil
over the face of God; does not reveal

I have half a mind to quote the next two lines that bring in Virginia Woolf but won't. It's only that Ms. Duffy sometimes appears to add in half sentences like 'does not reveal' that might have been something much better if returned to later or, if not, she needed her own editor, a kindly version of Ezra Pound, to cross a few lines out for her.
But one is always convinced by her sincerity, in the face of her fairly vacuous defintion of poetry (which we will be working on on Wednesday) that it is 'the music of being human', which I think is echoed in the lines with which she finishes this admirable book, never having suffered Andrew Motion's laureate block or Ted Hughes's self-appointment as seer and soothsayer, when she looks up,

to see my breath
                           seek its rightful place
with the stars,
with everyone else who breathes.

 


   

The Poem of the Decade

With Ms. Duffy's new book imminent, she is the only poet likely to be added to this year's shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection and prevent a walkover for Sean O'Brien's Goddess and Europa respectively. Although one can never quite say.
But my reading of new poetry, releases of new titles that recommend themselves and the buying of new such books has dwindled to the extent that this tenth year of the minorest of minor poetry awards is likely to be its last.

However, it was always the intention to look at the winners from those ten years and make a further shortlist for the Poem of the Decade, not the customary decade but 2009-2018.
I'm going to summarily give the Best Collection title to David Harsent's Night, from 2011, which has stayed in the memory most persistently but, for me at least, those ten years haven't produced the sort of list as competitive as those decades in which Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Larkin, Gunn, Sylvia Plath or Paul Muldoon were putting in their best work. But perhaps it's just the morning sun, when it's in my face, really shows my age.

Best Poem, however, is due more consideration, and I am doing this ahead of this year's O'Brien-Duffy head-to-head but can supplement any further contenders before reaching the decision. The shortlist as it stands is picked from the winners thus far.
Yesterday was a glorious Sunday going back to these poems while bathing, a picture to relish once conjured, only for The Early Music Show to follow up on the subject of Francois Couperin's  Lecons de Tenebres and suddenly one was re-assured that being alive really is worth it. But these are six excellent poems,

John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still Life with Feeding Snake
Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden, from The World's Two Smallest Humans
Helen Farish, Pastoral, from The Dog of Memory
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings from Not All Honey
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, from The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen
Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians, from The Beautiful Librarians

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There will be much more to think about in deciding this year's Best Event, with a few still to come and several already shortlisted.
Best Novel might be unsatisfactory with the Murakami here but having to wait its turn while Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf makes a powerful case for being Best Biography Ever.
The Best Record of the Year might also be hotly contested with other contenders involved beyond a debate between Shostakovich and Buxtehude.
We will see.

Observer reports poetry boom

Sunday's Observer reported a new 'poetry boom', a renaissance in the art marked by sell-out festivals, soaring sales and all kinds of mayhem and mania going on.
It is a story that is recycled every few years, usually coinciding with no new discovery about Shakespeare or other satisfyingly esoteric news to fill half a page with. If there's been no recent sighting of a beast on Bodmin Moor, nobody building a moon rocket in a garden shed or no teenage school student eloping with a teacher, then it must be time to wheel out the one about a new fashion for poetry.
It happened in the sixties with Adrian Mitchell, Ban the Bomb and the Liverpool Poets deciding that the likes of Edmund Spenser were too boring for them, and it's happened regularly since. The estimable John Cooper-Clarke could be forgiven if he has tired of being cited as in the vanguard but he probably won't if it keeps him in work.
What it means, of course, is performance poetry and this time it's Kate Tempest downgrading the art to an accessible level that abhors such deliberate difficulty as that espoused by Geoffrey Hill. It doesn't mean that suddenly, rather than pilates or model railways, some of non-campus lower middle class have taken to composing gently ironic sestinas or crafting syllabic sonnets to soothe away the anxieties of our difficult times. Would that it were, Mr. Ponsonby, would that it were.
So let's not be too alarmed. The disparate network of fuzzily overlapping societies, groups, magazines and readings is probably not going to be over-run by hordes of ranting doggerel-mongers full of pent-up anger and righteousness. They have always come and gone. Neither is it likely that any of our more eminent names, like Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage or Andrew Motion, those three successive Poet Laureates in no particular order, are suddenly to become the sort of national figure that Tennyson was and we should all be grateful for that, including them.
No, it was no more than another recondite piece of journalism swindling readers of their time and money by providing them with some words to read on a Sunday. It is unlikely to cause any more waves than a few cosmopolitan types looking up from their coffee and thinking, wow, poetry, how marvellous.        

A Survey of Contemporary Poetry

I'm not going to attempt such a thing. Good grief, no. I was led to thinking how difficult it would be to undertake, being so close to it, being a small part of a small part of it and not all of it being visible to any individual.
One might begin with the famous names from the big publishing houses, the 'mainstream' poets who we imagine might represent our age in a hundred years' time- Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, we might think, although posterity sometimes sees things differently. And then there'd be the local groups and activity in London. Oxford and the provinces, as well as the dedicated schools of avant garde manifesto-makers beleaguered in their stolid doctrines, plus the magazines, competitions and, perhaps most important of all, the individual readers and writers doing their own thing to their own satisfaction without troubling anybody else with it.
I wouldn't know where to start but one of my own windows onto this disparate galaxy of far-flung stars and solar sysytems is Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star, here, http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk/  
and in particular her Blog List from which you can scan the latest posts by those she follows, which I'm gratified to be included in.
Today I followed up Anthony Wilson and his thoughts on his 'Go-to' poets. His list comprises Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Transtromer as well as quoting Auden on Marianne Moore and it is so immaculate that I thought that any other poet he mentions must be worthwhile by association. I had never heard of Marie Howe but I was immediately off in search of her books. There is not apparently a Selected as yet and so I'll start with the most recent and let you know how it goes.
--
Otherwise, a new influx of books is due after a session of indulgent clicking away, irresponsibly just ahead of when I'm asked what I want for my birthday and I have to say I've just ordered a pile of records so I don't know.
I've begun George Gissing's The Nether World in preference to the breeze block that is Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wiilson. I can't believe I'll be ploughing through that line by line but it will be one to dip into although sadly the index leads us to not much on Jeremy Thorpe.
These follow the short anthology of memoirs about Joyce in The Joyce We Knew by Ulick O'Connor, which confirms at first hand much of what we thought we knew about the aloof, half-blind genius with a fine tenor voice, and the New Grove North European Baroque Masters for its brief biography and catalogue of works of Buxtehude.
Also on their way, alongside a selection of versions of Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres to compare with the latest new recording, are Elizabeth Foyster's The Trials of the King of Hampshire, Barney Curley's old autobiography finally found cheap enough and George's Ghosts, a biography of Yeats by Brenda Maddox. The Ellman account of Yeats was so unsatisfactory that I thought he deserved another chance. Brenda's book on Nora Barnacle was excellent and so if she can't make Yeats interesting, I'll have to assume it his fault after all.
So, with the Saturday Nap due to take us up to Boxing Day with horse racing advice of the most dubious provenance and the assessments of the Year's Best in all the usual categories, it is worth noting- should you be interested- that I only went away for a couple of weeks and I'm back here like a rearguard action, trying to show that the blog (although I'm old-fashioned and call this a website) is not a thing of the past.

Honestly

Poems, by which I mean the best of them, are some of my favourite things. Some carefully chosen words chosen by someone quite good at choosing them and put into a shape by them and they are good at doing that, too, when words are already one's favourite and most interesting things.
There can't be much wrong with that, can there. It is a victimless offence if it is an offence at all.
But the word 'poem' has always brought with it associations of something a bit fey. I know that poems can be harder and much more atavistic, if need be, than the appreciation of the 'good shooting scene' I heard being lauded in the office today by two lads who like films, especially if they feature Al Pacino and Robert de Niro.
But poems, as we know, aren't all about daffodils and swooning and, if you want to take on harder blokes than me on the issue then I'd be glad to direct you to Don Paterson, Ciaran Carson, Sean O'Brien and Tony Harrison. And Carol Ann Duffy.
It's not so much that I don't feel happy to be regarded as someone who writes 'poems'. I just don't like thinking of myself as a 'poet'. When I met Ian Duhig a few years ago, he asked my name and thought for a moment and then asked, 'Are you a poet?' and I had to say, no, not really.

I have written some poems. I wish they weren't called that and I wish that Roger McGough, amongst others, hadn't made it sound even more camp by calling them 'pomes' in the 1970's, when fey was the much more the message. But it's too late now to ask for a re-wording, a move to re-name them 'word-structures' in some hopeless, politically correct move that could never hope to succeed. And so, poems, and thus, poet, it is.

But I don't want to be thought of as a 'critic', either. I put my brief summaries of books I have read on here and that is known as 'reviewing', which is fine, but also 'criticism'. But I don't want to be thought of as a 'critic', which is generally regarded as having something bad to say about the work under consideration. In most cases I wouldn't have read the book in the first place if I hadn't expected to like it and so I hope I rarely post serious reservations.
But, as I was re-reading Larkin's Further Requirements, the follow up book to Required Writing, the volume of collected reviews, interviews and sundry items, I was immediately impressed by the way he wouldn't use superlatives to describe the best recent poems or else what would be left to describe the best of all time, among which he mentions Tennyson. But he remains refreshing, after all these years, when reviewing the Guinness Book of Poetry 1958-59, presumably the Forward or Salt book of its day, and saying,
And yet there is not much in it. More potent factors are the rottenness of poetry in any year...

And wouldn't it be great if critics said so more often if given books to comment on that they didn't like. So many reviews these days seem to approach the challenge like an O level student who regards their job as proving that the author in question was a genius and it falls to them to establish the fact. 
Not everything is a new, mind-blowing revolution in the art of letters. Most of it is, inevitably, derivative, and if we must be called 'poets', which is flattering to some of us, or 'critics', which I don't like the sound of, then we ought to do the job properly.
Whatever dirt Larkin was attributed with, and I'll just about allow the Thatcherism into this bargain, there was a certain honesty to admire in him. And, with a curriculum vitae of good, old fashioned, left wing credentials to my name, it won't make me a rabid right-winger to say so.
I'm happy to say that in each year of doing this website I have had no problem in finding something to genuinely admire when picking a favourite to nominate as the year's best but it might be that I've lucky so far.