Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 54

Juha Virtanen

In an already infamous episode of contemporary British and Irish poetry, the presenter and journalist Jeremy Paxman was appointed as one of the judges for the Forward Prize in 2014. The appointment was not controversial in itself. Instead, comments made by Paxman during the judging process raised a series of objections from a number of poets on social media. Poetry, Paxman argued, had “connived at its own irrelevance”; poets were only interested in speaking to “other poets” and reluctant to engage with “ordinary people.” What was needed, the presenter suggested, was an “inquisition” where poets would account for the creative and technical decisions they had undertaken while writing their work (Flood 2014). Certain reports of Paxman's speech also featured statistics from the online sales analysis service Nielsen BookScan, which depicted a decline in the sales of poetry publications, from £8.4 million in 2009 to £7.8 million in 2013 (Flood 2014). Moreover, as these statistics encapsulated the overall sales of poetry in UK‐based bookshops, the readership for contemporary poetry was potentially even smaller than these figures indicate: an Arts Council report on the state of poetry in 2000 concluded that only around 3% of collections sold were written by contemporary writers, and some 67% of this already small percentage pertained to books by a single author (Bridgewood and Hampson 2000, 1). In light of these statistics, one might conclude that Paxman's comments were not entirely unfounded. And yet, in 2012, the poet and critic Robert Sheppard noted that innovative British and Irish poetry was “living through a golden age” (Loydell and Sheppard 2012). A year earlier, Andrew Duncan claimed that the quality of poetry emerging from centers such as London was reaching “a historic peak” (Duncan 2011).

As these figures and observations are all relatively contemporaneous with each other, they pose a conundrum: how can an art form experience a golden age or a historic peak and simultaneously connive at its own irrelevance? Who reads modern poetry? In this chapter, I will endeavor to propose possible answers to these problematic questions. First, I will provide a very brief overview of how these issues have developed from the 1960s to the present day; second, I will outline how these debates are addressed in current scholarship; and, finally, I will suggest some further developments that could contribute toward offering a more comprehensive representation of the readership for modern British and Irish poetry.

In some respects, the objections and controversy around Paxman's comments are surprising, as his sentiments are hardly novel. In 1964, Adrian Mitchell opened his first collection, Poems, with an epigraph where he argued that “[m]ost people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people” (Mitchell 1964, n.p.). Here, the underlying claim poses a similar conception of poetry as an elitist praxis that is only interested in communicating with a coterie of like‐minded practitioners, which consequently disregards a considerable proportion of the general public. However, Mitchell's repetition of “most” is notable, as it relates this issue of coteries to questions of class. The poetry that ignores most people was—in Mitchell's view at the time—written predominately by “male, middle‐class, and university‐educated poets,” whose intellectualism and academicism ultimately alienated the wider public (Mitchell n.d.).

Although these social characteristics apply equally to both high modernists such as Pound and Eliot and the Movement poets of the 1950s, it is curious that the latter group generally receives greater public acknowledgment than the more experimental works of poets belonging to what some have called “the parallel tradition” (Edwards 2000, 34). Indeed, the Movement's poetics cohere well with a common understanding of what poetry is: empirical statements “about the non‐verbal external world” (Forrest‐Thompson 1978, xi), related through narratively and syntactically coherent, pristine, and closed verses.¹ For instance, in reading Larkin's “As Bad as a Mile,” we can—with relative ease—visualize the scene where the apple core misses the basket, and understand the situation as a humorous representation of everyday failures (Larkin 1964, 32). In other words, the poem appears to be accessible, and its accessibility relies on a deliberate limitation of its poetic interactions.² However, if we examine a poem such as J. H. Prynne's “The Glacial Question, Unsolved,” we are met with a complex mapping of geographical and geological questions that draw upon a series of scholarly references (Prynne 2005, 65–67). In order to understand the poem, we might have to track down Prynne's resources, and work out their implications within the text; at the very least, the poem requires multiple readings. These challenges are a pleasure, but the pleasure they provide differs greatly from the experience of reading Larkin's poem. As such, poems where the syntactical elements draw upon “notions of discontinuity and indeterminacy” (Sheppard 2005, 3)—or where the poet deploys complex, specialist vocabulary and concepts from scientific or philosophical discourses, as Prynne does—are frequently regarded as inaccessible, overtly academic, and intellectually elitist.

As reductive as these binary oppositions inevitably are, the history of modern British and Irish poetry offers many examples of such acrimonious factionalisms in terms of its audience. During Eric Mottram's editorship of Poetry Review in the 1970s, the editor's commitment to experimental work provoked “puzzlement, outrage, and eventual rejection” (Barry 2006, 152) among the magazine's readers.³ The middle‐class, suburban subscribers felt alienated by the apparent difficulty and the profanities of these poems, and dismissed them as dull pieces of infantilism (Barry 2006, 153–154). In other cases, poets themselves have seemingly fetishized the lack of wider readership. Iain Sinclair, for instance, makes frequent references to poetry belonging in exile among ephemeral publications that are difficult to obtain without a “team of private detectives” (Sinclair 1996, xiv). To elaborate, these statements represent a poetic sociality that is mistrustful of a public taste for easy pleasure, and instead regards fellow practitioners as a more receptive audience. While certain recent scholarly works and anthologies have sought to problematize the dichotomous taxonomies of the “mainstream” and the “avant‐garde,” the present panorama still relies upon these cultural stereotypes.⁴ The accessible, more widely read poems are deemed to soothe, console, and pacify “our sharpest experiences of grief and loss and bewilderment” (Goode 2011, iii), while more experimental works go unread because they are seen as acts of self‐absorbed obscurantism that disparages readers who are unable to understand it.⁵

Despite this brief overview, a clear narrative begins to emerge. Although the audiences of modern poetry as a whole are significantly smaller than those of novels or films, the internal divisions within this readership limit its public presence even further. While some “mainstream” poets may enjoy comparatively wider acclaim, the readers of experimental poems are supposedly limited to other poets, academics, and university students. A huge swathe of British and Irish poetry is in other words deemed too difficult for reading.

However, I think the assumptions of such narratives should be contested, and recent critical works offer some valuable alternatives to these conceptions of modern readership. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that modern artworks that seem incomprehensible appear as such because they transgress the common practices of (cultural) capitalism. Consequently, the most prominent detractors of these artworks reject them simply on the bases of crude assumptions. As he elaborates on this suggestion, Adorno offers a useful characterization that is applicable to the perceived notions of inaccessibility in modern poetry:

The non‐specialist will no more understand the most recent developments in nuclear physics than the lay person will straightaway grasp extremely complex [modern art]. Whereas, however, the incomprehensibility of physics is accepted […] modern art's incomprehensibility is branded as schizoid arbitrariness, even though [it] gives way to experience no less than does the scientifically obscure.

(Adorno 2013, 320)

This argument is quite similar to Robert Sheppard's view that no poem is more accessible than any other “since all poems are social facts open to social comprehension” and completion (Sheppard 2005, 7). In other words, Sheppard regards poetry as an unfinished task that requires a committed readerly engagement. A poem reveals certain facets of itself while concealing others, thus rendering the reader's task into a continual process of interpretation (Sheppard 2011, 7). To some degree, such views are perhaps indebted to “the convergence of text and reader” (Iser 2008, 295) in reader‐response theory—not to mention the tenets of poststructuralist literary analysis—but similar conceptions seem frequent in contemporary criticism. Peter Middleton, for example, has developed a nuanced account of a poem's “long biography,” in which the act of reading does not fulfill the poetic text; rather, it enacts the poem's continuance in time, which can also manifest itself through publications, performances, reviews, and criticism (Middleton 2005, 23–24).

The perspectives from Adorno, Sheppard, and Middleton all involve a reconfiguration of accessibility. The poem is no longer accessible because it has limited itself to expressing a coherent, empirical situation; rather, the poem's accessibility relies upon an invitation for the reader to participate in the continued production of its meaning. This position is also explicitly present in the poetics of several modern poets. For instance, Allen Fisher sees poetry as a process of constellated possibilities and readerly interactions:

where meaning is apparent, that meaning changes in relation to the meaning another may give it, or in relation to living after the first realisation of the meaning. And the meaning may take on a multiplicity that is summated or left impossible and so forth.

(Fisher 1999, 7)

It should be noted that Fisher does not limit this process of mutable meanings to the act of reading. In fact, his subsequent theorizations also place the poet in a similar position of openness, contingency, and vulnerability. The poem is not a closed unit of autonomous meaning, but simply a “confident approach” that—despite its “lack of solutions”—offers possible proposals about the issues that it examines (Fisher 2007, 11). In other words, Fisher's poetry develops an arena in which both the poet and the reader can collaborate in the assemblage of various interpretations.

Fisher's attention to process and “confidence in lack” help to clarify the experience of reading his early tour de force Place. Toward the end of the first book of this project, Fisher includes a section that describes his visit to Dove Cottage, which ends with a peculiar aside that resembles stage directions: “(at this point a reshowing / involved with XIX)” (Fisher 2016, 107). Turning back to the poem in question, its relationship to Wordsworth's cottage seems oblique and—at first—incomprehensible. The text is simply comprised of a short archeological note:

a Neanderthal skull with a hole in its base

artificially enlarged

was found within a circle of stones on the “floor”

in Monte Circeo, Italy

(Fisher 2016, 68)

However, the poem that follows the visit to Dove Cottage features an encounter with a sheep's skull—with its flesh eaten and lower jaw missing—on top of Threlkeld Knotts. As such, the earlier aside directs the reader to regard the Neanderthal skull as a prefiguration of the sheep's remains in the subsequent poem. In effect, these two fragments integrate each other: Threlkeld Knotts merges with Monte Circeo, and the two skulls blend together. A further degree of resonance between the two poems also emerges via Fisher's archeological resources. After the skull in Monte Circeo was first discovered in 1939, anthropologists proposed that it was a relic of a ritualistic murder involving decapitation and cannibalism (Blanc 1961, 119–136).⁶ Thus, the consumed flesh on the sheep's skull potentially reflects a continued sense of brutality that relates to Fisher's overarching anger at London's political superstructures, which have enacted an uneven distribution of opportunity and justice since antiquity. By inviting readers to consider the parallels between these two separate fragments, Fisher encourages a re‐evaluation of their individual significations, as well as their relationship to Place as a whole.

This brief example in other words demonstrates that Fisher's poetry—which is both syntactically discontinuous and immersed with various ranges of specialist knowledge—is not invested in an inaccessible, incomprehensible obscurantism or elitist derision. Rather, it openly invites its readers to participate in the production of its social comprehensions and completions. Because it openly shows its processes and interconnections, any reader who is willing to engage with the pleasures and complexities of Fisher's work can follow and interrogate its proposals without insurmountable prerequisites of specialist knowledge.

Thus, by contesting the assumptions that underlie the dismissive claims about the inaccessibility of modern poetry, we can begin to map out a more productive understanding of who reads it. At the very least, my preceding discussions have tried to demonstrate how modern poetry might be read. But are these notions of readership ideal or actual? Do such readers actually exist?

While poetry's audiences are undeniably smaller than those of other art forms, I would also suggest that the image of decline that emerged in conjunction with Paxman's comments does not paint an accurate portrait. My own experience of attending poetry readings certainly gives some credence to the historic “golden age” depicted by Sheppard and Duncan: Xing the Line, organized by Jeff Hilson in London, and Hi Zero, organized by Joe Luna in Brighton, have on many occasions attracted audiences of around 80–100 people.⁷ Moreover, the sales figures I quoted at the beginning of this chapter are based on aggregated “retail sales information from […] bookshops” (Nielsen BookScan n.d.), and contemporary poetry is not often distributed through such channels. For instance, Shearsman Books, an independent publisher of poetry, consistently sold approximately 10,000 units per year between 2011 and 2014. Each year, over a third of these sales were generated through print‐on‐demand purchases—the printing technology where a copy is only printed when an order is received. In addition, a considerable number of units are also sold to the poets themselves, who would then resell these copies during readings and other public events. By way of comparison, while both of these sales categories are annually in the thousands, Shearsman's direct sales to retailers usually amount to around 200–400 copies per year (Tony Frazer, email to author, October 2, 2014).⁸ A similar situation applied to Ken Edwards's now‐retired Reality Street. While the press's annual output between 2011 and 2014 was fairly modest (comprising around four books per year), their sales were consistently robust. Each publication received an average sale of around 200 copies, and the press's most popular volumes tended to sell in the thousands. Moreover, through Reality Street's supporter scheme subscriptions, each book benefitted from guaranteed sales of approximately 70–120 copies. As with Shearsman, only a small fraction of these units were sold through bookshops; the majority of Reality Street's sales took place online, either directly via the publisher's website, or through Amazon (Ken Edwards, email to author, October 2, 2014).⁹ Furthermore, these are only two indicative examples. Publications from small presses such as The 87 Press, Distance No Object, Contraband, Materials, Oystercatcher, and Veer Books are most readily available directly from their respective websites.

If we add online platforms such as those available from Pamenar Press and DATABLEED into these considerations, the channels through which modern poetry can find its readers grow increasingly nebulous and complex. Statistics that focus solely on sales from bookshops therefore offer an incomplete representation of the readership for modern British and Irish poetry. Of course, the poets and publishers I have discussed in this chapter might be wary of conceptualizing their work in terms of retailed units—and rightly so. Such discourses would, inevitably, violate the processual emphases of their respective poetics by turning these publications into marketable products. However, I have offered these examples as my concluding remarks in order to dispel the dismissive misconceptions of an art form that has connived at its own irrelevance. Despite the figures that accompanied Paxman's comments in 2014, subsequent years have begun to tell a different story: in 2015, poetry book sales in the United Kingdom reached an all‐time high of £8.8m, and in October 2016, they were set to surpass £10m; commentators attributed this upward trend to the emergence of energetic and innovative young writers, as well as the growing presence of experimental and radical work by BAME (Black, Asian, minority, ethnic) poets (Cowdrey 2016). A committed and dedicated readership of modern poetry clearly exists, and it evinces no signs of decline.