But why the bigger, deeper, wider Silence of the Poets?

Where have they been since 15 September 2008 when, as some are saying , ‘capitalism came to a grinding halt’, western banks imploded, and what was filched was not only our gold but our futures and our children’s destinies ?

If true, this would be a serious disengagement, part of a longer, wider withdrawal from the active , social agenda which I commented on in the context of the recent death of Adrienne Rich in America . I quoted from Mary Rourke’s obituary of her in the LA Times:

“Her intense critique of contemporary US society combined with her political activism set her apart from other leading women poets of her generation , including Sylvia Platt and Anne Sexton … and she urged every writer to address social justice in their art“.

Though not to much avail, it would seem; nor much helped by the phenomenon which Michael Lind – a mite intemperately – described (‘Prospect ’ July 2001 ) as “ The collapse of American poetry into the black hole of academic obscurity after 1945 ”; a captivity “ prolonged by the explosion of ‘creative – writing’ programmes ”.

A more convincing analysis of these elements of poetry’s social and cultural disengagement is to be found in Dana Gioia’s masterly ‘ Can Poetry Matter ? – Essays on Poetry and American Culture ’ ( Graywolf Press 1992).

Gioia who, with Derek Walcott, has himself done much through his own poetry to revive the rich and diverse metrical toolkit lost to ‘ free-verse and chopped-up prose’ (another of Lind’s angry phrases ) has a more measured critique of the university ‘ghetto’ phenomenon.

“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 ….”

Sadly, the UK poetry scene seems set on a similar pattern, and it is often difficult to see the wood for the trees of ‘ creative writing schools ’ , poetry professoriates , festivals and celebrity road-shows.

Our Tony Harrisons seem to be in short , rapidly dwindling supply.

In so far as ‘ poetry’ is a ‘profession’ and poets a ‘professional group ’ would their alleged ‘ absence-without- leave ’ matter at such a desperate time of unprecedented social and economic meltdown ? Isn’t it enough that the ‘politicians’ are first in line, alongside the banking and financial ‘professionals’ who comprised – uniquely – both prime instigators of the crisis and the most expensively educated of our supposed elites ( think of all those Davos junketings and business school ‘ leadership ’ symposia over so many years) ?

The question remains – at times of social crisis and change such as this what expectations, if any, should we have of a response from our so-called ‘creative’ elites – in theatre, music, film, the visual arts – perhaps poetry even ?

Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron would have regarded that as a ludicrously otiose question – though it has much more contemporary significance for UK poetry now as it tries to battle its way out of its more recent cul-de-sacs and back into the line of vision of its neglected citizen audience in homes, schools, factories, shops and offices.

Who’s writing what to match the fervour and incisive critique of Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’

Imagine what such a pen would be making of our bloated bankers and the demolition of young hopes…

Nor was such ‘engagement’ exclusive to politics.

Richard Holmes (‘The Age of Wonder’) and Ashley Nichols (‘Romantic Natural Histories’) have been reminding us throughout the Darwin bi-centenary years that the so-called ‘Romantic Poets’ were in the very thick of the run-up to Darwin and the break -through of science.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were rubbing shoulders with Humphry Davy and Priestley. Shelley was experimenting with chemicals in his Oxford rooms . Coleridge at every physiology lecture he could find in London ‘ to increase my stock of metaphors ’. Involvement and engagement have always been, and should remain, critical aspects of poetry’s collective public role.

More recently, was President Kennedy simply hallucinating when he said (honouring Robert Frost) just one month before his assassination:

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses …. The artist becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society…”

I think this is a good and necessary time to be asking where poetry now stands in relation to this massively changing world around us and whether its alleged ‘silence’ is, indeed, real or relevant. In particular, where – if anywhere – are the signs of poetry’s own innovatory changes which might, for instance, parallel the great adjustments to the immediacy and dramatic relevance of contemporary theatre pioneered by David Hare’s ‘The Power of Yes’ at the National Theatre ? Its subtitle is – ‘A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis’ and it is quite definitely ‘art’.  Who would ask less of poetry?

‘On the Silence of the Poets’ marks the beginning of a new dialogue I am initiating to find the evidence and some overdue answers.

Watch this space!

 Ralph Windle  Oxford 13 September 2012

Among the many wonders of the world
Where is the equal of this creature, man?

…Nothing seems beyond him, except death.
Death he can defy but not defeat .

Seamus Heaney
‘The Burial at Thebes’ 2004

A quiet, slightly stunned sense of grief has characterised the public reaction to the going of our consummate poet Seamus Heaney. As usual, the media and celebrity hagiographers were quick off the mark, but the sad excesses which harrowed Yeats, Frost and other high profile public poets to their graves have been, thankfully, relatively muted.

For Seamus Heaney was quintessentially a ‘people’s poet’, deeply engaged in their histories of thought, origins and language, and committed to that ‘poetry of involvement’ that I have been so much missing, and arguing for in these spaces, since the 2008 financial melt-down washed away so much of the West’s hard-won social and economic gains.

So, given his too-early death, I am pleased to have drawn attention here to this key aspect of his genius as recently as March this year, and in the necessary company of his rare contemporary peers – Tony Harrison and Derek Walcott . The occasion was Tony Harrison’s first ‘uncensored’ reading (BBC Radio Four, 18 February 2013 ) of his 1980’s poem ‘V’ – a massively important and deeply moving poetry event.

I quoted Gregory Dowling’s view that the thesis underlying this sequence of Harrison’s poems was the assertion that “ it is by ‘owning the language’ that the ‘ruling classes’ have managed to maintain their social supremacy; so Harrison has taken up the task ‘of bringing the voices of the northern working classes into the classical forms of English poetry ‘.”

I doubt Dowling’s ‘poetry as class warfare’ rhetoric, but have long recognised that, for Harrison, poetry is a ‘craft’, in direct line of descent from those of his father and tradesmen forbears, and learned by hard work and apprenticeship to the craft masters – what Yeats called ‘sedentary toil and the imitation of great masters.’ Hence, says Harrison,

I strive to keep my lines direct and straight,
And try to make connections where I can…

And these words chime with those of another great craftsman poet I cited – Derek Walcott. He talks, too, of “ … trying to get rid of the mystique as much as possible … So we can then say that the craft is as ritualistic as that of a carpenter putting down his plane and measuring his stanzas and setting them squarely.”

So from that great day when I first opened Seamus Heaney’s ‘ Death of a Naturalist’, many years ago, it has been clear that he, too, saw himself as a worker, a craftsman, though with different tools, in the longer labouring traditions of his forbears. ‘Digging’ , which I quoted in March, is his moving life-affirmation of this view …

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father digging. I look down ….

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

‘Digging’
(from ‘Death of a Naturalist‘ 1966)

The ‘craft’ motif was to persist throughout Heaney’s life, surfacing again 40 years later, for instance, and with the same reverence, in his 2006 ‘District and Circle’ collection.

Seamus, make me a side-arm to take on the earth,
A suitable tool for digging and grubbing the ground,
Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift,
Tastily finished and trim and right for the hand ….

The grain of the wood and the line of the shaft nicely fitted
And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell.

‘Poet to Blacksmith’
(from ‘District and Circle’ 2006)

This analogy suggested that much of the ‘craft’ of the poet might also be taught and learned.

“I can help you with that part,” he told his early students at Harvard, “ the other part is up to you “ ( Christopher Benfrey, New York Review blog, September 2013). “ He didn’t try to turn us into copies of himself. He rarely mentioned his own poems. Instead, he tried to find for us poets further along the path we students seemed to be taking.”

That was in the 1980s, as he turned 40, and in the comparative lull after the more spontaneous outpourings of his early poems. What then emerged, against the backdrop of the unspeakable troubles in his beloved Ireland, was a voice which uniquely spoke both to the wider public conscience and to the more intimate, loving domesticities of family life. It was a needed voice, recognised by his Nobel Prize, but always ‘ involved ‘ with the close or wider world about him.

His brilliant translation of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ ( Faber and Faber 2004 ), which he adapted to form the libretto for the Dramma per Musica opera, ‘The Burial at Thebes’ ( Globe Theatre, 2008 ), spoke to the timeless conflicts between individual freedom and the State, but did not disguise the contemporary parallels between George W Bush and Creon, despotic King of Thebes.

So, as with Harrison, it is an ear for language, alive and inter-generational, and rich in inherited nuances and rhythms, which most powerfully activated his mission. Both, it also happens, could draw on the rich ‘classical’ tradition which has empowered many a poet’s voice; but it is the nearer, more complex multi-layering of family and tribal cultures and histories which has more often eluded the individual and collective creative memory.

Not so with Heaney.“ Memory was everything to Seamus” says his friend and occasional travel companion Andrew O’Hagan (Guardian Arts 3/09/13).

“ The memory of his father digging in the yard. The memory of peeling potatoes with his mother … He had a mind to Ireland’s memory, the seasonal return of faith and possibility, the falling away and coming back of things … He wanted to offer value to a notion of existence beyond the bounds of sense , and that is where his language led him, to the power of wonder and miracles in daily life”.

So it is of some consequence that he chose to share with us not only his poetry, but also the hard-run realities of the search. His Introduction to his translation of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Beowulf’ epic ( Faber and Faber 1999 ) is both a necessary preparation for any reader of the work; but also a free-standing ‘master-class’ in the creative process involved.

The work had a long, hesitant gestation between the invitation to undertake it and committing to it.

“ Even so, I had an instinct that it should not be let go. An understanding I had worked out for myself concerning my own linguistic and literary origins made me reluctant to abandon the task. I had noticed, for instance, that without any conscious attempt on my part certain lines in the first poem in my first book (‘Death of a Naturalist’) conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics,”

( Here he invokes the now-famous lines from ‘Digging’ above.)

“Part of me, in other words, had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start … I suppose all I am saying is that I consider ‘Beowulf’ to be part of my voice- right. And yet to persuade myself that I was born into its language and that its language was born into me took a while: for someone who grew up in the political and cultural conditions of Lord Brookeborough’s Northern Ireland, it could hardly have been otherwise.”

So, to our great gain , we have this thrilling re-evocation of a great epic, by a process which Heaney memorably describes as “ some sense that our own little verse-craft can dock safe and sound at the big quay of the language“.

Seamus Heaney’s most certainly did.

They said that of all the great kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

Those three lines end his ‘Beowulf’ saga.

Not a bad epitaph for Seamus Heaney himself, if we keep well in mind his laughing disavowal of anything so bumptious for an old Irish wordsmith.

_________________

© Ralph Windle 2013

His immediate worry was the progressive ‘sell-out’ to powerful corporate sponsors of supposed ‘public’ facilities such as the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University (BAE Systems, BP, Lloyds etc); or Oxford’s new ‘Shell’ geoscience laboratory, part-mandated to help find and develop still more sources of fossil fuels – which attention to society’s broader needs might put in question.

The problems are arguably much greater now than when Benda spoke. Monbiot explains – “Now it is the weak state, not the strong state, which is fetishised by those in power, who insist that its functions be devolved to ‘the market’, meaning corporations and the very rich … and too many ‘scholars’ seem prepared to support this new dispensation”.

There seems plenty of evidence to corroborate Monbiot’s fear, especially as the cult of marketisation shrinks the levels of public investment throughout our societies – but who are these ‘scholars’ anyway, whose voices risk being drowned out by the clatter of their begging-bowls around the corporate corridors? After all, this ambivalence has a long history across our Western universities, and the search for ever-richer ‘endowments‘ is etched deep in many a Vice- Chancellor’s Credo . Benda’s ‘clercs’ are, most nearly, our modern-day ‘public intellectuals’, generally defined as -

‘well-known, intelligent, experienced persons whose writings and other social and cultural contributions are recognised not only by academic peer groups and readers but also by many members of society at large’

According to Edward Said  “Regardless of the field of special expertise, as a public intellectual one is addressing and responding to the problems of his or her society and expected to rise above the partial preoccupation of one’s own profession”.

Or (as defined by Prospect magazine) a public intellectual is ‘someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it‘.

In 2005, Prospect and Foreign Policy journals conducted an international survey of ‘The Top 100 Public Intellectuals’, though with a total absence of nominated women, it clearly said more about the respondents than the ‘intellectuals’ themselves. However, the findings did allow 22 assorted ‘novelists’, ‘playwrights’ and ‘writer/authors’ into the ‘public intellectual’ category, confirming at least the legitimacy of some of those outside the academy.

Following a repeat of the process in 2013, AC Grayling contributed the comment –

‘Can one give a catch-all definition of what it is to be a “public intellectual”? Consider this list: Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Stephen Jay Gould, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, indeed anyone on Prospect’s list of people who merit or are thought to merit the label. They have very little in common other than intelligence and engagement, and the fact that they speak out. Those three things, accordingly, might be taken to capture the essence.’

So, if ‘intelligence’, ‘engagement’ and ‘speaking out’ are the essence of the public intellectual, and novelists, playwrights, authors and artists qualify, how-come the ‘poets’  are absent from all the lists as our social, economic and broader crises grow? The inertia greeting my own related questions in recent months seems to suggest that there’s little appetite for poetry’s entry into this mainstream debate; and there are some suggestions that even to ask for a more active and involved poetry and profession is in some way foreign and hostile to its creative ethos.

This would seem to be at odds with history as well as social expectation. I’ve reminded us that American Presidents, no less, have not only looked to poetry as significant, but suggested its pre-eminent role in protecting our concerns.

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses …. The artist becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society…”

(President Kennedy honouring the late Robert Frost, just weeks before his assassination.) I have also drawn attention to the evidence of Richard Holmes (‘The Age of Wonder’) , Ashley Nichols (‘Romantic Natural Histories’) and others, that the so-called ‘Romantic Poets’ were in the very thick of the run-up to Darwin and the great break -through of science.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were rubbing shoulders with Humphry Davy and Priestley. Shelley was experimenting with chemicals in his Oxford rooms . Coleridge at every physiology lecture he could find in London ‘ to increase my stock of metaphors ’. Few of significance were away with their lyres on some mythical Parnassus.

Nor did this prevent Shelley’s interventions into politics when he felt the situation demanded as with his uninhibited ‘England in 1819’

Imagine what such a pen would be making of our bloated bankers and the demolition of young hopes…

Involvement and engagement have always been, and should remain, critical aspects of poetry’s collective public role. There are still some positive things at the interface with science – Ruth Padel , Jo Shapcott , Robert Crawford among them – and Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage are among others who might be at no apparent disadvantage to the talkative Graylings and Dawkins.

Yet, how strangely quiet it would all seem to the Shelleys, their Yeats, Frost and Owen successors, even the rumbustious Betjeman!

It is announced that one of the UK’s most energetic independent publishers – Salt – is no longer to publish collections by single authors, because of falling interest in poetry among consumers. ‘Extremely sad news‘ said the Poet Laureate; ‘A great shame‘ agreed her predecessor.

Nielsen Book Scan shows a sharp decline in the overall poetry market in the past year, by 15.9% in value to £6.7m.

I wonder why, and might it be worth a shout ?

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.

More on the search soon.

Ralph Windle, 20 April 2013.

‘Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress
Clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,
The looms of owned language smashed apart..’

He suggests that the underlying thesis of this sequence of poems is to assert that it is by ‘owning’ the language that the ‘ ruling classes ’ have managed to maintain their social supremacy; so Harrison has taken up the task of speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves – “bringing the voices of the northern working classes into the classical forms of English poetry…”

Whether this justifies Dowling’s “ poetry as class-warfare” rhetoric is for discussion, but it is certainly the case that, for Harrison, poetry is a ‘job’, a ‘craft’, linked with and on behalf of his community – precisely that poetry of involvement that I have been talking about, and missing, in the context of other, more current social and economic disintegration.

What’s more, it’s a job in direct line of descent from those of his father and tradesmen forbears …like them, he learned it by hard work and apprenticeship (I learned, he says, by what Yeats called ‘ sedentary toil and the imitation of great masters’…)

I strive to keep my lines direct and straight,
And try to make connections where I can…

You may recall some earlier comments I made on another great craftsman poet, Derek Walcott, who has supplied his own critique on why both form and language must be accessible to his communicants if it is to engage comprehension and memory.

‘I’m trying to get rid of the mystique as much as possible. And so I find myself wanting to write very simply cut, very contracted, very speakable, and very challenging quatrains in rhymes. Any other shape seems ornate, an elaboration on the cube that really is the poem. So we can then say that the craft is as ritualistic as that of a carpenter putting down his plane and measuring his stanzas and setting them squarely.’

Walcott, remember, is also the poet who sees ‘rhyme’ in terms of ‘sounds coupling to form a memory’ on the way to fulfilling his poet’s mission; part of the apparatus to supplement the more basic necessity of an available and understandable language transferred into the ‘ownership’ of those who otherwise might be excluded and disfranchised from it.

And what of Seamus Heaney who, unsurprisingly, also sees himself as a worker, though with different tools, in the longer labouring tradition of his forbears

Harrison, Walcott and Heaney are a formidable poetic trio who – I suspect – would have little difficulty with another artist’s (Picasso’s) judgement on the necessary kinetic energies of his own – and others’- art.

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet? How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
Pablo Picasso. (Quoted in Russell Martin’s ‘Picasso’s War’)

Which brings us, with some urgency, back to the question I have been trying to raise elsewhere about the apparent distance and detachment of whatever constitutes or ‘speaks for’ our contemporary poetry profession, from the deep social, moral and political distresses around us. A customary – but decreasingly persuasive – answer is to assert the essential solitariness and idiosyncracy of the poet’s art – though Shelley, Neruda, Lorca and many others might demur.

The sad, contemporary image being projected is that of the poet as a mainly self-indulgent, campus-based, creative-writing-school or social-media junkie, on a semi-permanent festival trail and comfortably aloof from the less salubrious ‘peat-bogs’ of banking crises, soup-kitchens, social and economic disintegration, grinding poverty, injustice and inequality. Not much evidence of ‘instruments of war’, they are saying, in this supposed genteel world of contemporary, poetic letters.

One laudable part-exception has been the resurgence of highly creative interactions between poetry and contemporary sciences – though this simply, but importantly, re-establishes a centuries-long tradition, stretching back via the ‘romantic’ poets (Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats et al), on to the ‘scientist’ poets (Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy and others), and back to the more distant classical ages – of Empedocles, Aristotle, Lucretius and the ‘De Natura Rerum’.

Ruth Padel, Robert Crawford, Jon Glover, Jo Shapcott are among contemporaries who have chosen to dirty their hands at this poetry/science interface – which is very much alive and kicking. Yet this welcome, still partial, renewal of interactive relevance has not involved that more basic ‘emancipation’ or ‘legalisation’ of an ‘alien’ language which underpins Tony Harrison’s deeper concerns for society – and its poetry.

Which is why, in ‘On the Silence of the Poets’, and elsewhere, I’ve lamented the general absence of the mainstream poetic voice from the desperate social inequalities and injustices of our times. Paradoxically, the major ‘running’ among the Arts, so far, is being made in the important creative responses of live theatre and cinema, and I plan to comment further on these developments again soon. Meanwhile it’s wake-up time for some more involved and relevant voices of poetry.

That is why Tony Harrison’s BBC Radio Four uncensored reading of ‘V’ (on Monday 18 February 2013) was such an important, as well as deeply moving, event. It was beautifully timed, at this equivalent period of crisis to those must-never-be-forgotten days of the Eighties, to raise again, with great authority, the role and relevance of poetry in the biggest, most threatening, social and political issues of the day.

We’d better get on with it – or heed Harrison’s prophetic refrain (Them & [UZ])…

“So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy
Your lousy leasehold Poetry”

RW. 2 March 2013.

Why, then, should the uninhibited soundings-off of a long dead, larger-than-life, mid-20th century thespian have locked on more immediately to what I and many others see as issues still critical to contemporary poetry, than the very latest Poetry News and impressive show-pieces from its leading professional Society ? Burton, remember, was never himself a practising, fully-paid-up or professionally accredited poet – simply the exquisite ‘ reader ’ of others’ work.

For the schoolboy me, it was the rich, Welsh baritone of Burton’s voice which first brought poetry alive – even while Dylan Thomas’s own radio readings of Under Milk Wood were still brilliantly around. Burton, Olivier, Neville and Scofield were serving up a rich feast of Shakespearean and other poetry from the living stage – light years before and beyond the thin gruel of so much contemporary ‘performance’ poetry.

Such voices seemed the appropriate extensions of a poet’s – even a Shakespeare’s – own, delivering its intended resonances, properly nuanced, beyond the scripted page and into the empowered possession of the hearer – the ‘sounds coupling to form a memory’ of Derek Walcott;  or the more startling ‘ Art is an instrument of war’  of the uncompromising Picasso…

“What do you think an artist is? ” Picasso asked. “An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet? How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”   

 Poetry too ?

Either way, the artist’s ( here, poet’s) message has to be fully delivered to have its chance of invoking action, reaction or the nod of comprehension. Which is why Burton’s scathing comments on the inability of so many lauded poets to read or speak their own verse competently remain surprisingly apposite. Here he is on Auden, with whom he ‘read’ once at Oxford :

“His own (Auden’s) reading was the usual toneless monotony of the poet reading his own stuff. Dylan was an exception. But listen to Yeats or TS Eliot. I think that once the mould of form was smashed by a master or series of masters, Pound or Eliot perhaps in poetry … anybody can fool you. And will. And we’ll never know they’re mucking us about….”

One interesting revelation of Raphael’s review is that the young Burton, as an RAF recruit in the early days of the Second World War, found himself on a short-course at Oxford where he starred in an OUD’s performance of Measure for Measure, directed by Neville Coghill. From which time, Raphael conjectures, “ he was always haunted by a sense of what he was missing – the autonomy ( as he imagined it ) of a writer and a bookman .”

I find it relatively easy to envisage him as potential writer, as well as speaker, of poetry – and, judged by his comments on poetry and poets ( as well as fellow actors ), it seems unlikely to have been of the ‘genteel’ variety. Certainly he became progressively disenchanted with the worlds of Hollywood and celebrity film, but too late to vanquish the other harpies pursuing him.

I continue to believe – with Picasso – in the kinetic power of art, and that poetry must not be made an exception under the contemporary cultish pressures towards introspective self-revelation, social disengagement and fostered obscurity. Which is why admiration – at The Poetry Society’s impressive nourishment of new talents, for instance – is tempered by disappointment at its relative neglect of the poetries of involvement. Whatever we put on the 2013 agendas of maximum concern – economic melt-down, climate change, poverty gaps, the Syrian mayhem, the young unemployed, an ever-ageing population – it is imperative that poetry is there, in the thick of it , not only in the quiet boudoir and ‘creative-writing-school’ pavilion. The world needs it – not least the health of poetry itself.

There is some progress in poetry’s social involvements and relevancies, even though little acknowledged by its traditional establishments. Since the 1980s, ‘business’ and the work-place – in which the majority of us spend our days – have been progressively opened up to poetry’s influence, its language of relationships infiltrating what Charles Handy called “ the arid deserts of too many of our businesses .”

Dana Gioia, John Betjeman. Gavin Ewart, Wendy Cope, Peter Porter, Michael Ivens, Ted Kooser, James Autry and many others around the world participated in my anthology ‘The Poetry of Business Life’ ( Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 1994). Gioia’s critique of the poetic significance of this development appears in an earlier blog.

www.ralphwindle.com/articles/poetry-matters 

Even more vibrant has been the role of poetry in the major cross-disciplinary programmes of
arts/science creative interaction stimulated by the Darwin/Snow anniversaries, and my own and others’ work since 2000  with various groups and universities, such as the brilliant arts/science Encounters programmes at Sheffield University. Established poets such as Jo Shapcott, Ruth Padel, Jon Glover, Robert Crawford and many new writers have made major contributions to this field, in which music, theatre, ballet and visual arts are also excitingly involved.

www. creativevaluenetwork.com  

It would be good to have the Poetry Society voice raised for the necessary cause of a more socially involved poetry-of-action, not to replace but to supplement the more introspective muse.

Time for a more robust 2013 agenda ?

Ralph Windle.

We met through the pages of Fortune magazine, when I found myself the British outsider among a small group of so-called ‘Business Poets’ then writing in the US where Dana had managed to combine the Vice Presidency ( Marketing ) of a General Foods product, with the publication ( 1986  Graywolf Press ) of his first collection ‘ Daily Horoscope’, with a second ( 1991 Peterloo Poets ) ‘ The Gods of Winter ‘, on the way.

He was soon to be free of his professional business life, but a heartening exemplar as I struggled with mine . He remains impressively modest about his growing creative achievements and open-minded about the various paths poetry could take. He entered with great enthusiasm into the concept and fruition  of my ‘The Poetry of Business Life’  anthology and was generous about the inclusion of some of his own poems

Here is a typical example of his unusual and generous insights in a letter to me in 1991.

Dear Ralph,                    11/22/91

    I was very interested by your letter and articles. Most interesting of all was your statement that you had chosen business people not only as your subject matter but also as your audience. That isn’t only unique; it is newsworthy. Knowing one’s audience that well must be artistically liberating. You know exactly what references they will get and which you have to explain. That seems to me the central problem for the poet today – knowing how much he can condense his language, how referential he can be, what his audience will understand implicitly. The whole culture has become so fragmented and so debased that poetry often works like a remedial text. Poetry needs to move sideways to work best, but one can’t do that without knowing the audience will follow.

I gave a lecture last week at the Wharton School of Business …Afterwards I had lunch with the translator/poet/critic David Slavitt – a man who has made most of his career outside academia but recently joined Penn’s English Department. He pointed out to me that the smarter students were at business school not in the English department. I fear he may be right. In any event, there are a great many very smart people in business. It would be tragic to think that they are lost of high culture. Surely they need art as much as anyone. There must be a better way of reaching them. I’m delighted to see you rising to the challenge.

I hope you will include some prose in your anthology. Even a few paragraphs here and there might help the unfamiliar reader get his or her bearings. Feel free to excerpt anything you want from any of my essays which serve your purposes ….

All the best.

Dana.

In a few short subsequent years, poets have been pushing through the breached ramparts of the work place and the office into this wider world. So it is a good time to look again at the ideas set out in the anthology’s introduction which were part-prologue and part-stimulant to these happy events.

The Western Myth of Managerial Man (and Woman) is one of the dominant myths of our Age – testimony to the pervasiveness and power of Business. For most of the 20th century it emphasized those human attributes thought relevant to executive success, especially competitive ambition and financial numeracy; and groomed many generations, through business schools and corporate institutions, in the techniques and attitudes considered appropriate to this calling.

Some other important and, arguably, more basic human yearnings – emotional needs and wider family, social and intellectual aspirations and relationships – were long thought irrelevant and even dangerous to this corporate model. The tensions between the corporate and the fuller life began to provoke new questions in a renascent business literature.

From the unease of many individuals involved in business, the agenda widened to embrace the deeper needs of corporations themselves and their increasing influence on society. It was not an accident that the language of poetry was eventually invoked to help the change.

The conventional language of business itself, as Roy Doughty accurately observed, is predominantly a language of information – accounting, policy manuals, financial reports – aimed at “de-lineating, defining, separating” for the purposes of measurement and control. It is a technical language, honed to its specific purpose, but constrained in wider, more complex applications.

By contrast, Doughty continues, “The language of poetry is the language of evocation, and it is this language which best speaks about relationships. Poetry is just as precise and effective in the realms of relationships as the language of accounting is in the realm of finance.” Business people were in need of this language because the world of commerce, no less than the worlds of ecology and spirit, is a nest of inter-relatedness.

Development of a richer language in the business world also required, I argued, the rescue of the word “business” from the narrowing constraints being put on its meaning and application. For what is business anyway? It’s a good Old English word (bisignis: busy-ness) that has been progressively wrenched away from its core meanings – task, work, occupation, profession, trade – toward an even more
narrow concept of dealing, buying, selling; and, more recently, the thin financial and accounting veneer of business activities. We need “business” back for that richer diversity of activities by which we all barter our work and skills for our pittances. Tycoons and Top People are not the only ones in “business” even though, in the age of the image-makers and the business pages, they have become obtrusively dominant.

“Business,” in this broader sense, and its poetry, pre-dates by many centuries the Corporation, Henry Ford and even the East India Company. Sa’adi, the Persian poet, died in 1291 but bequeathed to all businessmen to come the aggrieved epitaph:

The luck of wealth dependeth not on skill,
But only on the aid of Heaven’s will.
So it has happened since the world began –
The witless ape outstrips the learned man.

Women aspirants for business had a poetic champion in Agathias, many centuries before the Equal Opportunities Commissions. Martial, a Latin-speaking emigrant from Spain to Rome in 64 A.D., explained the banker’s winning psychology long ago:

Tis hard refusing when you’re asked to lend;
But to refuse before you’re asked displays
Inventive genius worthy of the bays.

Money, wealth, escape from poverty – arch motivators of business enterprise – are recurring themes in poetic literature from the Nineteen Ancient Chinese Poems of 300 B.C.; and stimulated their greatest epic drama in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

Poets were prominently there, too, when the industrial revolution, starting about 1760 in England, spread the technologies of machine and production engineering around the world and shaped “business” and the “corporation” toward their now familiar forms. One such poet, Edward Young (1683-1765), even lays claim to be father of business verse:

Thee, Trade! I first – who boast no store,
Who owe thee nought – thus snatch from shore,
The shore of Prose, where thou has slumbered long;

Is ‘merchant’ an inglorious name?
No; fit for Pindar such a theme; . . .

Young is (happily) better remembered for the message on many an office wall – Procrastination is the thief of time!

So the more modern and contemporary poets who dominated my anthology inherited a poetic language which, even in the subject matter of business, has a long and rich tradition. The “globality” which many now claim for business is an infant compared to the “global” reach of poetry.

In more recent times, it was again a poet who drew attention to another distinction – central to current discussion of business life – between the archetypal “businessman” of literature (entrepreneur, free-actor, risk-taker) and the unromantic “professional corporate manager.” It was W.H. Auden in The Managers.

In the bad old days it was not so bad.
The top of the ladder
Was an amusing place to sit: success
Meant quite a lot – leisure
And huge meals, more palaces filled with more
Objects, books, girls, horses
Than one would ever get round to . . .

The last word on how we may live or die
Rests today with such quiet
Men, working too hard in rooms that are too big,
Reducing to figures
What is the matter, what is to be done . . .

Most professional managers are now “businessmen” only in the broadest, colloquial sense of the word. Even with the occasional share option, and however senior, most are the hired craftsmen and journeymen of business, not the assumed plutocratic “owners” with whom society often identifies them; though Charles Handy’s multi-careered ‘portfolio man’ and the independent ‘home worker’ of the internet age may give a further boost to non-conformity.

Auden, with no evident life connection with “business,” joined other “outsider” poets in the anthology – Ogden Nash, G.K. Chesterton, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others – who have pungently commented on it from a distance.

Since “business” has now absorbed or replaced so many other occupations which once supported a living, it would be a devastating blow to poetry itself if the poets found neither place nor inspiration in it. Many of our most prominent twentieth century poets have worked in business with no apparent fatal damage to their muse, even where they have ignored it as a topic.

As Dana Gioia (one of the finest of contemporary American poets and a late marketing vice president of General Foods) has reminded us, this group includes T.S. Eliot, A.R. Ammons, Wallace Stevens, James Dickey. To which I would add Walter de la Mare, Roy Fuller and many others. Even with these poets of genius, however, who made little direct allusion to their business lives, imagery from that life often breaks through. I see some of it in T.S. Eliot (the “Unreal City” of The Waste Land) and, in lesser moments, it bubbles out:

I shall not want Capital in Heaven,
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond.
We two shall live together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.

In ‘The Poetry of Business Life’, however, we focused mainly on “Business Poets” in both senses of the phrase: those who work, or have worked, in “business” and have also chosen to write about it. This draws on a rich mixture of “professional” poets – who have published works, and are easily accessible; and newer, sometimes “unpublished” writers. Among the latter, I found a refreshing incidence of women.

Among the well-known “professional” poets, both Gavin Ewart and Peter Porter have seen business through the prism of the advertising agency where, presumably, the “creative” facility with words has some direct business utility.

Michael Ivens has had and retained a wider business interest, to match his poetic one, and his Jenkins Is A-Weeping has the immediate, authentic stamp of someone who has been there:

Unaccustomed as he was
To public speaking, laughing, crying, dancing,
Singing, or other extravaganzas
Better left undone, or second best,
Released in the private bar or in the home,
He found that,
“Retirement is a bit of a shock,
I’m going to miss all my colleagues and friends,
And thank you so much for this wonderful clock
And . . .”
Heard a curious song
And stopped.

No one has articulated the dilemmas of the contemporary manager-poet better than Dana Gioia . His pieces, reproduced in the anthology from The Gods of Winter and Daily Horoscope, are rare direct comments on his business life within the totality of those collections. My dialogue with Dana Gioia, on poetry and business, was a major stimulus to the anthology project.

One of the most committed and highly influential “poetry-in-business” voices is that of James Autry – until recently president of the Magazine Group of the Meredith Corporation in the United States. His book Love and Profit is – with its unique mixture of verse and prose – a cogent, but unsentimental, plea for the release of the emotions in the corporate workplace.

Less well known may be some of Autry’s earlier pieces (from Nights Under a Tin Roof and Life After Mississippi), but I find them unique in their biographical tracing of the business executive poet to the young Tennessee boy in a different time and place.

You are
in these hills
who you were and who you will become
and not just who you are
She was a McKinstry
and his mother was a Smith
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In other times and other places
there are new families and new names
He’s ex P and G
out of Benton and Bowles
and was brand management with Colgate
And listeners sip Dewar’s and soda or puff New True Lights
and know how people will do things
they are expected to do . . .

The combination of “successful property developer” and “prominent businessman” strains most conventional assumptions about “the poet.” Harry Newman Jr., chairman of a Long Beach, California, property company, is all three. Inside his collection, Behind Pinstripes, is evidence of a highly sensitive writer, with the courage to examine the complex costs of business success – for love, family, friends – as the downside of its exhilarations.

Cultivating a friend in business
Is tightrope walking in a gale

If you have something to gain
And use your friendship
As a moral lever
For achieving it,
You have placed a price tag
Of no value
On your relationship,
And in the process
Made you and it, not him
A whore

Inevitably I had to look to translation to discover how far these poetic business involvements are replicated elsewhere. They are – and I included some glimpses of how Finnish, German, Japanese and other poets have reacted to the same phenomenon.

In the lively and developing Poetry of Business Life it is the newer work and emerging talents which most excite. Touching only the fringe, I found evidence of many contemporary younger writers – men and women – producing energetic, marvelously diverse and assured work on many aspects of this life. They come to it with the poet’s idiosyncracies and lack of inhibition and hold their own with confident ease among their (currently) better known peers.

Function and status within the business organization seemed irrelevant to the poetic urge. Banker, engineer, computer technician, accountant, personnel executive, consultant, marketeer – all were included. Secretary, midrank executive and chairman rubbed shoulders. Some well-known business names, too, confessed to the writing of verse as a reflective companion to their careers.

I had offered the reader some rough ‘map references’ in the form of eight subject ‘Cantos’ recognizable in the familiar life of business (Money, Markets, Work, Power, Technology etc); but suggested they be discarded as readers grew more familiar with the book’s – and poetry’s – territory. For a good poem may hold a universe of meaning, and the better pieces I had chosen could leap easily across these arbitrary boundaries between one reading and another.

Even so, the spontaneous pressure of poets for inclusion spawned unexpected categories, most notably travel (‘Comings and Goings’). Travel proved, as in the wider corpus of poetry, to be a major preoccupation for contemporary business poets and, whether commuting or distant journey’s, symbolized transience and the way work extends its grip beyond the office door.

Charles Blackburn Owen said it well, compressing in this metaphor much of what recurs in the anthology:

Divided love, divided care,
Synthesised at half-past eight,
Urgency is down the stair,
Through the door and garden gate,
Platform One, time to spare
To corner, kill the rebel thought,
To love your neighbour, to compare
His shadow pale or long or short.
A half-way house to nowhere new,
A precognition of decay,
Before the hearse that bears us to
Another unheroic day.

The three-year process of compilation of ‘The Poetry of Business Life’ and subsequent research and analysis, suggest that re-connecting ‘business’ and ‘management’ to the mainstream of poetry and creativity does not require some great ‘post modernist’ leap. The need is for some diligent communication and critical scholarship of a kind sometimes lacking in the ‘management sciences’. As Ted Kooser, Vice President of the Lincoln Benefit Life Company, and himself a distinguished poet, wrote in the Conference Board Journal (USA):

‘I wish I could steal into corporate headquarters all across the country and replace every one of those pop-management books with collections like this one. It would greatly humanize American business. Poetry has a way of making life and work meaningful – something that the management ‘gurus’ have not yet stumbled upon.’

Kooser knows that the sense of ‘irony’, wholly missing from so much of the conventional business ‘literature’, is a vital ingredient of the poetic sense, the ‘ars poetica’.

That’s why I included Wendy Cope’s brilliant ‘Engineers’ Corner’ provoked by the Engineering Council’s advertisement in the Times, lamenting the absence of an ‘Engineers’ Corner’ in Westminster Abbey.

We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –
That’s why so many poets end up rich.
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?

Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day . . . . . .

The poetry-in-business network has continued to expand internationally since the anthology appeared and a further edition is planned, alongside some overdue research into the syntax and characteristics of the poetic and business languages.

In moving forward we need to acknowledge Joseph Joubert’s wise reminder that ‘You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you’.

© Ralph Windle 2006

“ But she also passionately addressed the anti-war movement and wrote of the marginalised and underprivileged. Her intense critique of contemporary US society combined with her political activism set her apart from other leading women poets of her generation, including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton … and she urged every writer to address social justice in their art “.

She was also the poet who ( in 1997 ) turned down the National Medal for the Arts from President Clinton, since she deplored – “ the honouring of a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonoured”. She was to become much ‘honoured’ and her credentials as poet were widely endorsed.

“ Adrienne Rich made a very important contribution to poetry. She was able to articulate a modern American conscience . She had the command of language and the imagery to express it, “ wrote Helen Vendler , Harvard Professor and doyenne of American poetry critics, in 2005; though ‘establishment’ approval was totally irrelevant to Rich’s idiosyncratic path.

Professor Vendler was, of course , more recently a little less charitable towards a younger American woman poet – albeit a Pulitzer prize-winner and former poet-laureate – Rita Dove . As editor of the recently published ‘The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry’, Dove found her pick of the best US poetry of the last century under withering attack by the distinguished critic in
the New York Review of Books.

“ A furious row has broken out in the rarified confines of American poetry circles “ wrote Alison Flood in the Guardian ( 22December 2011 ) “ after grande dame of poetry criticism Helen Vendler attacked former poet laureate Rita Dove’s anthology of 20th century American poetry for its focus on ‘multicultural inclusiveness’ rather than ‘quality’ “.

Both, in some hyperbolic exchanges in the New York Review, scaled unprecedented heights of invective for two such distinguished ladies of letters.

“ Multicultural inclusiveness prevails “ alleged Vendler. “ Dove’s tipping of the balance obeys a populist aesthetic voiced in her introduction “.

“ Barely veiled racism”, “ condescension “, “ lack of veracity “, railed Dove.
“ Whether propelled by academic outrage or the wild sorrow of someone who feels betrayed by the world she thought she knew – how sad to witness a formidable intelligence ravished in such a clumsy performance “.

My first reaction was of amusement and rejoicing – that the world of poetry still has the power to quicken the blood, raise the hackles, and provoke the vocabulary we might well regret at tomorrow’s waking. There’s life in the old muse yet!

More reflectively, and as past editor of a much more modest anthology, I believe Dove’s full freedom and integrity of choice to have been implicit in her very selection for the editorial role. And it’s that choice, as it might have been Vendler’s if she had received the mandate, which adds the savour to this seminal event. So what a poor, sickly thing it would have been if it had not stimulated criticism and comment; – but it’s the impugning of motive which is misplaced – though maybe indicative of something more important for the poetry cause.

It is partly a clash of the generations, of course, for which this ‘formal’ event supplies a rare opportunity within the more general incoherence of the ‘poetry’ scene. Who guards the doors into this poetry ‘ profession’? Who signs the ‘graduation’ certificates, issues the licence to practise ? or are such questions still to be seen as exercises in the literary occult?

Oddly, given the essential solitariness of the activity, there seems to be a growingly widespread disposition to huddle together in ‘poetry societies’, cyber-social networks and ‘creative writing’ confederations. Licensed by a shrinking elite of publishers, there is a small, highly recogniseable, inner group of the anointed, on a perpetual cycle of lit.fests, mutual prize-givings, laureateships and ‘creative’ master-classes. In the US, and increasingly elsewhere, the most common denomination is ‘professor’ and habitat ‘ the campus ’. Both Rita Dove (University of Virginia ) and Helen Vendler ( Harvard ) are professorial insiders of this system; but it is the ‘literary-critic’ element of the latter’s poetry role which is key, both to the current ‘spat’ and the future paths of Western poetry.

These are big, important issues which will remain high on forthcoming ‘Poetry Matters’ agendas; but for a medium whose very stuff is metaphor, let me tease you in advance with a brilliant analogy from the theatre.

David Hare is one of the greatest post-war innovators in British Theatre. His recent ‘Mere Fact, Mere Fiction’ accompaniment to his latest play ‘South Downs’ sets out a view of creative innovation and change, and its obstacles, which contrasts greatly with poetry’s current equivalent.

“ If you set to writing plays in the postwar years, it was necessary, or at least expected, to pass through a portal of approval. In prospect, this gave a comfortable, orderly feeling to the idea of being a British dramatist. Kenneth Tynan ….guarded the portal on one side from his position at the Observer. Harold Hobson … guarded the other side from the Sunday Times. A novice playwright had every reason to expect that a life in the theatre would involve attracting and then retaining the interest of at least one of these two men. Hobson’s name was inextricably linked with Beckett’s and with Pinter’s. Tynan’s fortunes rose with his advocacy of the work of Osborne. These were the writers they championed and whose view of the world fired them up. They were interlinked by a profound correspondence of belief.

“Today, no such correspondence exists. No living theatrical figure is associated with any particular critic ….. to work seriously in the British theatre it is no longer necessary even to know the name of the Observer’s theatre critic. ….. “

Quis custodiet (poetry’s) custodes …… ?                More soon!  

  RW  10 April  2012

Whatever happened to Wordsworth’s ‘ emotion recollected in tranquility’ or ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’? When do poets laureate get to think and write something, except between airports, rail stations and seminar rooms, poor souls ?

I ask, because ‘Poetry Matters’ is an unabashed take from ‘Can Poetry Matter? –Essays on Poetry and American Culture’ ( Graywolf Press 1992) by my American friend and collaborator, Dana Gioia, a unique combination of pre-eminent poet and penetrating critic.

Poets in America, he thought, had been progressively converted from ‘artists’ into ‘educators’…..

“ Poetry today is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession – not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology, but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia”. So that now, he goes on…. “ 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 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 made to conform to institutional ones”.

It was certainly thought a bit of an oddity when, back in the 1980s, I conceived the eccentric notion of an approach to people in business through verse, and found new audiences and writers alike in the supposedly alien readerships of the financial, business and management presses.

My celebratory 1994 international anthology could, by then, be called ‘ The Poetry of Business Life’ with no trace of irony; and seemed to prove the truer Wordsworth assertion (but quoting Coleridge) that all original writing “must itself create the taste by which it is to be relished”.

For ‘business poetry’ this required even more – legitimising the poet’s ‘ language of feeling and emotion’ within a two-century-old ghetto of mechanistic measurement and accounting. I’ll be saying more on the magic of this language anon.

As Professor Roy Doughty (Center for Ethics and Social Policy, Berkeley, USA) said in his appraisal of my anthology, “the language of poetry is the language of evocation… the language of business information says something about objects, but the language of evocation speaks about relationships… business people also need this language of evocation because the world of commerce, no less than the worlds of ecology and spirit, is a nest of inter-relatedness”.

Or, as I once put it in Bertie Ramsbottom’s “Death by Merger”…

For the moment, I suggest we go into battle with the case for poetry eloquently stated by President JF Kennedy, less than one month before his assassination, when honouring the late poet Robert Frost:

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses …. The artist becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society…”

He has, as Frost said, ‘a lover’s quarrel with the world”.

That’s no bad place to start…