Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 48

David Kennedy

Anthologies of British mainstream poetry have tended to generate considerable controversy. This is because they are not really concerned with poetry per se but with poetry as a mirror of the nation and its moral life. The convergence of nation, morality, and poetry dates from Robert Conquest's New Lines (1956). Conquest argued that the anthology's nine poets represented “a genuine and healthy poetry of the new period” and “a new and healthy general standpoint.” His narrative of recovery from recent sickness was reinforced by references to “corruption,” “a debilitating theory,” and “a condition,” and by dismissals of poetry dominated by “the Id,” “unconscious commands,” “sentimentalism,” “unpleasant exhibitionism,” and “sentimentality.” These generalized terms stood in for any detailed esthetic argument because, as Conquest was forced to admit, the New Lines poets shared “little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles.” At the same time, the poetry's “empirical […] attitude” was “a part of the general intellectual ambience (in so far as that is not blind or retrogressive) of our time.” “Ambience” is another generalized word that echoes Conquest's use of “atmosphere” (three times), “moods,” and “mood.” The implication is that if you have to ask for clearer definitions then you are part of the problem.

Conquest's introduction established some important aspects of mainstream poetry anthologies. First, there is a dismissal of the recent past and a hailing of the present as a site of changes, shifts, trends, or emergent groupings. Second, there is the editor presenting a generalized account of insider knowledge. Finally, this generalization removes the burden of having to justify the selection as a unified whole. This pattern was largely reproduced in subsequent anthologies but with greater focus on history and politics. For The New Poetry (1962), Al Alvarez redefined the restraint of Conquest's poets as “the gentility principle” and demanded that poets wake up to history and engage with “the forces of disintegration.” Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) dismissed “The implication of The New Poetry that a correlation necessarily exists between gravity of subject and quality of achievement” (13). They argued that poetry had not developed in that direction and offered Seamus Heaney as their exemplary poet: someone whose work derived from “The Movement virtues of common sense, craftsmanship, and explication” (16) but had developed into oblique, refracting fiction‐making. And just as Conquest had buttressed his argument with a lengthy quotation from Coleridge, so Morrison and Motion did the same with Keats.

The 1993 Bloodaxe anthology I coedited with Michael Hulse and David Morley originally had the working title of Eighties/Nineties but ended up borrowing Alvarez's title to justify its argument for significant change. The introduction was a naively pluralist, pro‐postmodernist, anti‐Thatcher polemic that offered rather overdetermined arguments about the extent to which the poetry it collected challenged the age. One other notable feature of these anthologies is the contracting or expanding movement they enact: Conquest (9 poets), Alvarez (28 poets), Morrison/Motion (20 poets), Hulse/Kennedy/Morley (55 poets). It is clear that the Conquest and Morrison/Motion anthologies reflect periods of cultural and political isolationism, conservatism, and cynicism about or exhaustion with ideas of community and the collective. Alvarez's anthology is very much of the 1960s while the Hulse/Kennedy/Morley New Poetry's celebration of diversity was a rejection of Thatcherism's antisociety, a celebration that, with hindsight, looks increasingly like a cover for the impossibility of drawing any meaningful sketch of the contemporary scene. Indeed, where Conquest and Alvarez were able to construct reasonably coherent arguments about the poetry they anthologized, Morrison and Motion and Hulse/Kennedy/Morley seemed to struggle to accommodate the diversity of the contemporary scene. For example, the inclusion of Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney by Morrison and Motion spoke to an important trend in postwar British poetry in which the marginal starts to become central. However, such poetry is at a considerable distance from, say, the sophisticated fabulism of James Fenton, and Fenton, in turn, seems equally distant from the exuberant “Martianism” of Craig Raine, which now reads like the ultimate in a post‐postwar consensus poetics.

This is the cultural history into which the 2009 anthology Voice Recognition sought to write itself. Such writing into history was quite self‐conscious, as James Byrne and Clare Pollard invoke Alvarez's anthology to argue that “Technique is not enough. Talent must be fuelled by the experience of a life outside of the poems” (13). Poetry that is the “mere recounting of anecdotes or minor stagings of epiphany” (13) must make way for poetry that registers “the creative stimuli that can be found through travel, translation or through a broad appreciation of visual art” (13) and “a wide appreciation of the ‘confessional’ American poets” (14). Previous anthologies have often found themselves arguing for shifts that are already over. This was true of Morrison/Motion and the Bloodaxe New Poetry. Voice Recognition described a recognizable contemporary scene. Unlike its predecessors, Voice Recognition did not have a title that refers to poetry. This was reflected in the poetry world that the introduction sketched, a world that was predominantly performance‐driven. It was also reflected in a sentence that would have been impossible a few years before: Jay Bernard “is a DJ for the Poetry Society and podcasts regularly” (19).

Voice Recognition thanks “faculty from many universities who provided recommendations.” This acknowledgment reflects the fact that none of the poets had published a full‐length collection and many of them had undertaken some form of graduate studies. At the same time, the editors could not decide what they thought about creative writing and the academy. They tell us that “Almost every university going seems to have a poetry course, which is frequently backed by renowned faculty” (11). The sentence starts by sounding a note of exhaustion that seems to promise disapproval and yet suddenly swerves into a kind of awkward reverence.

Byrne and Pollard continue to tell us that MAs in Creative Writing “can encourage conformities of style” and “many of the same‐sounding, low‐stake, well‐mannered (but going nowhere) poems we read whilst putting together this anthology were from poets who had recently come along the MA conveyor‐belt” (12). The idea that British MA programs are collectively teaching a latter‐day version of the well‐made poem is bizarre. One suspects that this was Voice Recognition's own version of attacking the recent past as many MAs are overseen or taught by poets who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. As David Cameron remarked to Tony Blair in his first House of Commons speech as Tory leader (07.12.05), “you were the future once.”

Blair and Cameron are not as remote from this anthology as one might think. A group of poets whose reference points are from an anthology that is nearly 50 years old, Rilke, Pound, and American confessional poets, and whose work represents (incredibly) “after years of other regions being prominent […] a real shift back to the capital” (11), has an odd sense of poetry, history, politics, and just about everything else. What they have, in fact, is a gap, and it is a gap they share despite Voice Recognition's representing three distinct generations: b.1988–1991, b.1984–1986, and b.1977–1982. This gap is the result of having grown up through the Blair era. Thatcher's infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families” was rewritten by New Labour in a variety of ways. One version might be, say, “there is no such thing as ideology, only things that work and things that don't.” But to deny society or ideology or nation is to remove any way of defining the self and the result is that your only reference point is yourself and your convictions. This explains the feeling throughout the introduction of the editors struggling to define their poets against anything. Indeed, the “recognition” in the anthology's title is highly significant because previous mainstream anthologies clearly had been matters of definition. The cultural moment that James Byrne and Clare Pollard describe was, in contrast, dehistoricized and depoliticized. Or, as Ahren Warner puts it in “Epistle,” “there are no signs of our times” (161). The present is unreadable without a sense of the very recent past.

What is most surprising in the context of a generation‐defining anthology is the number of voices that seem to lack confidence or seem to revel in an inability to communicate. The speaker of Heather Phillipson's “Crossing the Col d'Aubisque” finds that “The Smiths are in synch / with what I don't express” (128). The speaker of Jay Bernard's “109” tells us “I don't know if I can talk” (25) and the mother in Emily Berry's “The Mother's Tale” “won't share a drop of emotion” (31). All this has the curious effect of suggesting that the mainstay of mainstream poetry, the personal lyric, is largely inoperative.

By contrast, the few poets who seem genuinely interested in doing something with form, language, and voice—Siddartha Bose, Mark Leech, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Sophie Robinson, and Ahren Warner—catch the reader's attention with an often quite pronounced sense of provisionality and unpredictability. The opening of Sophie Robinson's “unspeakable” is a good example: “Your name swallows my lips & / the backward downward rage of all / girls knocking through me” (142). These poets have visibly and audibly thought about what is involved in the act of reading and how different types of text produce different reading styles. Their poems repay re‐reading because there is much less sense of their colluding with the usual readers of poetry. Crucially, the work of these poets converges with what the mainstream dismisses as avant‐garde or experimental poetry.

The poetry collected in Voice Recognition seems largely unaware of and unconcerned with what has dominated British mainstream poetry since about 1950: anxieties about class, region, gender, and race. Byrne and Pollard are the first anthology editors to show no interest in poetry as a mirror of the nation. In this, of course, they only reflect the attitudes of their chosen poets. But it makes Voice Recognition an early monument to a postnational poetry. The editors and their poets have removed one of poetry's principle claims for recognition: its ability to offer unique insights into the relationships between private and public and between self and nation that define us all.

Anthologies, then, tell us particular types of story about poetry and its relationship to the world. As is apparent from the discussion in the preceding text, the story has often little to do with the poetry itself. Chris Jones has written that Alvarez's “essay, ‘The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle,’ has focused people's minds on what anthologies are for: what is each anthology's brief and purpose? Anthologists return again and again to its arguments, assimilating and reacting against its abiding concerns, and from it create new narratives of contemporary literature” (Jones 2014, 2). With the exception of Voice Recognition, the anthologies discussed so far can be said to perform what Robert Hewison has identified in postwar British culture as “negative feedback” with the recent past (1987, 300).

The idea of negative feedback provides a story arc in which anthologies of mainstream poetry can, for the most part, be readily located. It is much harder to do this with anthologies of writing from the parallel tradition of experimental poetries. The period under discussion in this companion has seen a number of significant anthologies of such writing. The New British Poetry 1968–1988 (1988) embraces the diversity of contemporary poetry. It has four editors who managed a section each: women's poetry, Black British poetry, poetry of the British Poetry Revival, and some younger poets. It collects 85 poets and includes poets as disparate as Eavan Boland and Linton Kwesi Johnson. By contrast, Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1999) emphasizes the outsider and underground nature of experimental poetries and portrays a scene of “remote, alienated, fractured” work written by “apes from the attic” (xvii). It collects 36 poets and seeks to rehabilitate five older poets: J. F. Hendry, W. S. Graham, David Jones, David Gascoyne, and Nicholas Moore.

Other notable anthologies include: Paul Green's Ten British Poets (1993); John Matthias's Twenty Three Modern British Poets (1971); A Various Art by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (1987), which gathers J. H. Prynne and 16 other poets associated with Grosseteste Review and Ferry Press; Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (1999) by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain; and Nicholas Johnson's Foil: Defining Poetry 1985–2000 (2000). For the most part, such anthologies have defined themselves against the dominant mainstream poetic. Sinclair mocks the Poetry Society's “New Generation Poets” promotion of the mid‐1990s. Crozier and Longville assert that “the poets who altered taste in the 1950s did so by means of a common rhetoric that foreclosed the possibilities of poetic language within its own devices” (12). Similarly, Caddel and Quartermain write that “One purpose of this anthology is […] to uncover what the forces surrounding The Movement and its successors have helped to bury” (xxii).

The most recent anthology of experimental writing, Nathan Hamilton's Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (2013), departs from this model. It registers important changes in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. The book is notable for its methods of selection and composition. An initial group of poets chosen by the editor were then asked to make their own selection. The second group then repeated the process. The result is an anthology of 74 poets and the effect is something like a collage. Much of the work in Dear World is interested in formal experiment. The introduction comprises small episodes of prose. The tone of these appears more or less random and entirely personal to the editor until two and a half pages in when a formal proposition is made about poetics, discussing “product” and “process,” and then dismissed in the final sentence of that section.

Hamilton values the poets in Dear World … for two reasons. First, because they construct a linguistic stance against the world. Second, because they seem to be politically angry. There is a struggle going on somewhere and they feel obliged to comment on it. This makes the anthology reminiscent of Conductors of Chaos (1999). Hamilton's introduction, like Sinclair's, writes back to the poets. His style is deliberately disorientating and it soon becomes apparent that he is attempting a history of views of poetry in the contemporary period.

Hamilton's concern is that public discussion of contemporary poetry is increasingly difficult. He is very astute in his connection of experimental poetry with the aims and methods of conceptual art while recognizing that the experimental poem is less commodifiable than the material products of fine art. It is here that the problem of public visibility, media relevance, inclusiveness, or lack of representation may lie. Of course, a significant part of the project of experimental poetry is to be resistant to easy commodification. Such concern with the public profile of poetry can be traced through other experimental anthologies of the period.

The introduction to Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 expresses an anxiety about the dominance of a monolithic, centralized culture, which has enabled mainstream poetry to be both highly assertive in its public profile and suppressive of alternatives. What concerns the editors of Other and similar anthologies is the ease with which mainstream poetry has turned itself into a national narrative. The question of what national narrative experimental poetry tells remains moot. Editors of experimental poetry anthologies are also concerned about the way that the mainstream poem remains so closely identified with the Movement poem and its alleged gentility. A national poetry narrative that is largely founded upon genteel anecdote might be expected to be enfeebled and vulnerable, but, in fact, it turns out to be a surprisingly flexible instrument that continues to find an audience. By contrast, experimental poetry with its concern with serious issues and with reinventing poetic language remains largely ignored.

The anthologizing of innovative work remains, then, largely a question of placing such work against the mainstream. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (1996), edited by Maggie O'Sullivan, collects 30 poets with clearly constituted author identities and distinctive poetics. The introduction states that the title of the collection refers specifically to the exclusion of these poets and their writings from the places of cultural reception, and it argues that this is a matter of gender politics. This implies that experimental poetry by women is doubly devalued.

The editor of Sixty Women Poets (1993) describes her poets as having been constrained for too long. Anthologies in the period under discussion in this Companion have been involved in a cultural power struggle, so much so that a review of the Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry (1993) was entitled “Jihad.” Anthologies express wider sets of cultural tensions, which involve negative feedback with the recent past. They are moves in a continuing struggle, markers that are thrown down as challenges to a sometimes barely visible enemy. It is also worth noting that there is a real danger of anthologies misrepresenting the poets they collect. The work of anthologies becomes a matter of distorted history.

A desire to correct the exclusions of distorted histories underwrites the large number of women's poetry anthologies that have appeared since 1960. The earliest of these are passionately feminist: Cutlasses and Earrings (1977) by Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor, Licking the Bed Clean (1978) by Alison Fell et al., and Lilian Mohin's One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry 1969–1979 (1979), which contain mainstream and experimental poetries. Mohin's anthology collects 55 poets born between 1929 and 1955. Mohin identifies “the primary quality” of the poems as “one of redefinition [and] contributions to the long task of renaming the world and our place in it” (Mohin 1979, 5). Other notable postwar anthologies include: Carol Rumens's Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post‐Feminist Poetry 1964–1984 (1985) and New Women Poets (1990); Fleur Adcock's The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry (1987); Linda France's Sixty Women Poets (1993); Maura Dooley's Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997); Jeni Couzyn's The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven British Writers (1998); Deryn Rees‐Jones's Modern Women Poets (2005); and Carrie Etter's Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (2010), which concentrates on experimental poetry.

The feminism of the late 1970s proved hard to sustain—Rumens's 1985 subtitle is a telling one—and Vicki Bertram notes Adcock's antipathy to feminist poetry (see Bertram 1996, 269–273). In place of explicit feminism, new vocabularies of valuation have emerged. For Linda France, women's poetry “often has a wild quality” (1993, 17), while for Jeni Couzyn it reflects “the depth and range of female consciousness” and is “angry, powerful, hurt, tender, and defiant” (1998, 16, 18). Carol Rumens asserts that “any amassing of women's voices will necessarily amount to a fairly radical critique of current society.” The poetry in her 1990 anthology is “funny, sexy, witty, rebellious and, perhaps, heartfelt” (1990, 12), uses “eclectic” (1990, 13) forms, and is written by poets who “are behaving more like novelists these days” (1990, 15). Deryn Rees‐Jones, surveying a century of women's poetry, notes tendencies toward “the monologue, the surreal, the use of myth and fairytale” (2005, 20) and “a poetics of witness” (2005, 21) and identifies a desire to avoid “excessive femininity” (2005, 22).

Finally, we should not forget anthologies such as E. A. Markham's Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (1989), Donny O'Rourke's Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (2001), and The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) by Menna Elfyn and John Rowlands. These books remind us that postwar British poetry must be understood as a sometimes bewildering plurality of poetries and voices.

Some 50 years ago, the American critic Randall Jarrell wrote that he was living in the age of anthologies. His comment seems even more pertinent today. For while the era of anthologies that define a cultural moment is probably passing away, recent years have seen the rise of commercial anthologies such as The Nation's Favourite Poems or Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With). There are anthologies to help with bereavement and even with depression. Robert Potts, a former editor of Poetry Review, calls these “the poetry anthology as lifestyle accessory” (Potts 2003). This does not bode well for the anthology as portal to the exciting and mysterious unknown.