Ralph Windle » We Asked – Where Have All the Poets Gone? TLS Joins the Search.

We Asked – Where Have All the Poets Gone? TLS Joins the Search.

In Poetry Matters, as you may know, we’ve been trying to spark some discussion across the poetry community about its apparent detachment from the unprecedented issues of social, political and economic degeneration all around us.

Could it be something to do with poetry’s widespread relocation to the university campus and ubiquitous ‘creative writing schools‘?

This was one hypothesis we had discussed in ‘ The Silence of the Poets ‘ quoting Dana Gioia’s chastening conclusion for the US:

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet asks another upon being introduced is ‘ where do you teach?’. The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform to institutional ones….”

There can be little doubt that this relocation is well advanced in the UK – but is it a key factor in contemporary poetry’s current detachment ? Are we prey, too, to Gioia’s withering US assessment of too many campus poets writing primarily for each other within an introspective critical framework of publications divorced from most media which their abandoned publics are likely to see?

I had made my initial comments in September 2012, when Carol Ann Duffy made her sporting Olympics bid to earn her laureate’s ‘butt of sack’ with “Translating the British, 2012“ . There seemed some promise for our cause in her…

“ We’ve had our pockets picked,
The soft, white hands of bankers,
bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;
we want it back…”

More recently, I returned to the theme with the much more significant (for poetry) event of Tony Harrison’s magnificent reading, on BBC Radio Four, of the unexpurgated text of his 1980’s poem ‘V’. This was a much- needed ‘master class’ in what an involved and responsive poetry can make of the social and political realities around us. I hope they were listening out there on the campuses.

So, as you can imagine, hearts raced a little faster when the eyes recently caught the magic words “What is the future for poetry in Britain?” – albeit discreetly tucked away in the back page ‘NB‘ column of The Times Literary Supplement ( April 12, 2003 ) and sandwiched between James Joyce in London and the forthcoming ‘ Brita Kongreso de Esperanto ‘. ‘NB’ is one of my favourite spaces in the TLS and , luckily, I’m the kind of reader who prefers to start at the back, so attention levels were still high.

‘NB’ – with appropriate attributions – was drawing on a recent ‘White Review’ interview with Keston Sutherland who, they informed us, is “ at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry ”.

I couldn’t fail initially to warm to Sutherland’s quoted vision for poetry…

“I hope that it might become a collective ambition for readers and poets alike: to radically reconceive and feel again human relations in honour of and in the brilliant light of the power of poetry”.

Amen to that ! – but what better time to start than now, when ‘human relations’ cry out for some comprehensible poetic response ?

Sadly, the ‘radical’ forward view from this poetic frontier on the Sussex University campus seemed depressingly downbeat with a good deal more ‘ a demain’ than ‘en avant’. For Sutherland reportedly went on….

“ I suspect that lots of anxious…. poets will go on writing verse which, with more or less justification, is meant to encapsulate and preserve in the aspic of sentimental memory and sensation, the trivia of working-week-life… or the audience will go on uncritically accepting that poetry is and ought to be in this way a modest and circumscribed art and, in its end, a comfortingly politically inert and ineffective one…. “

That’s sad and worryingly defeatist. What alternative could ‘ the audience’ possibly have unless ‘the poets’ at least start engaging these issues as they engulf us – and in some language they ‘ the audience ‘ can hope to understand? Whose language is it anyway? as Tony Harrison keeps on asking. Still, ‘NB’ asked a good question and hopefully will stay engaged with the ‘future for poetry in Britain’ – as we certainly will.

And in perusing the most recent TLS for any further relevant insights, a powerful one came – as is so often the case – from a largely unrelated, teasingly entitled, article by Barbara Everett (‘Love or money – What isn’t in The Merry Wives of Windsor‘. TLS April 19th 2013)

Calling in evidence for her thesis a Henry James definition of an artist as “a man habitually ridden by the twin demons of imagination and observation“ she delivers an insight which seems central to our current preoccupation…

“This balanced pairing of imagination and observation, the world inside the head and that outside the self, seems to me an unimprovable explanation of Shakespeare’s greatness as a writer, a poet . The trouble is that our highly politicised culture has despised and abandoned imagination“.

This getting of ‘imagination‘ back into balance with ‘observation’ is a strong clue to the greater involvement –and – relevance potential of our poetry.Meanwhile, in this year’s Grand National of UK Arts, Theatre and Cinema remain lengths ahead of Poetry in its so-far lame responses to a changing world.