Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 63

Since 1960, poetry anthologies have abounded, accumulating like a series of reactions and counteractions in a petri dish, with each editor staking a claim to different histories. Robert Conquest's hugely successful anthology New Lines (1956) set the tone for the rest of the century. It solidified the reputations of Movement poets such as Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin; it led to the persistence of what Robert Sheppard (2005, 20) has dubbed the “Movement Orthodoxy” in contemporary poetry; it has been a touchstone for other anthologies since its publication, and sympathy with, or rejection of, its poets continues to be a badge of identification. There are many surveys of contemporary British and Irish poetry outlining the intricacies and specifics of contemporary anthologies. Notable among these are: Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (1999); John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950 John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950 (2000); Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents (2005); Fiona Sampson, Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (2012); and David Wheatley, Contemporary British Poetry (2015). Each of these surveys offers rich summaries of the editorial positioning of specific anthologies: Alfred Alvarez's reaction to the “gentility” of New Lines, with his The New Poetry (1962); The attempt of Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion to consolidate a new generation of poets after the Movement in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982); Iain Sinclair's answer to this latter with a collection of marginalized poets in Conductors of Chaos (1996); the collection of radical poets in The New British Poetry 1968–1988, edited by Gillian Allnutt, Fred D'Aguiar, Ken Edwards, and Eric Mottram; and Keith Tuma's attempt to show an American readership that more innovative poetry was being written in Britain and Ireland in his Anthology of Twentieth‐Century British and Irish Poetry (2001). Anthologies are a weapon of choice in what Corcoran (2007, 2) calls the “field of battle” over what constitutes representative contemporary British and Irish poetry. And the disputes continue in a recent argument between the poet and academician Andrea Brady and Don Paterson, one of the editors of an anthology designed for the American market called New British Poetry (2004).

Paterson's introduction to New British Poetry contains a bad‐tempered attack on what he calls “the Postmoderns” whose work he considers “incomprehensible” (xxix), and who apparently produce poems with “a special category of difficulty whose sensible interpretation or interpretations cannot be confirmed” (xxix—emphasis in the original). Their “monotone angst,” “effete and etiolated aestheticism,” and “joyless wordplay” (xxxii) offer Paterson little pleasure. His attack is also a defense of “Mainstream” poets who, in contrast to the Postmoderns, “still sell poetry to a general readership” (xxv), write “honest” (xxx) poetry of “real originality” (xxxi—emphasis in the original), “are engaged in an open, complex and ongoing dialogue with the whole of the English tradition” (xxxi), and do not “engage with the false and very un‐British paradigm of artistic progress” (xxiv) as the Postmoderns do. Paterson's introduction demonstrates an extreme anxiety tied up with a defense of one's poetic tribe against the apparent encroachment of un‐real poets and poetries. In a letter of response published in Chicago Review, Brady (2004) outlines the contradictions in what she describes as Paterson's “most hateful digression on experimental poetry recently bundled into print” (396) and the “violence of its assault on all nonconformist practices” (402). Paterson's attack on “Postmoderns,” his defense of the “Mainstream,” and Brady's searing response exemplify the ongoing disputes between mainstream and marginal or experimental poetries. Hence, Sheppard (2005, 27) (a “Postmodern”) offers these unattractive descriptions of Movement poetry:

The Movement favoured a poetry of closure, narrative coherence and grammatical and syntactic cohesion: a poetry of “backgrounded” form rather than a poetry of foregrounded artifice. Its emphasis on the demotic, upon “tone” and upon speaking voice, posited the existence of a stable ego, an author‐subject, as the unifying principle of the poem; its rhetoric operated at a social level.

Many of the poems in Paterson's anthology—those of Gillian Allnutt, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lavinia Greenlaw, for example—exhibit such traits. Paterson's own poem in the anthology, “Imperial” (161), is a case in point. A single voice describes the sticky and jaw‐tiring seduction of what we assume to be a man of a woman. The poem opens with the casual but daring question: “Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I'm frightened” (l. 1) with the next line observing, “I covered her mouth with my own” (l. 2). Simple, if disturbingly predatory, language overlays an iambic trot toward an inevitable consummation: “we gave ourselves up, one to the other / like prisoners over a bridge” (ll. 7–8). The poem ends with a jaunty joke: “the night we lay down on the flag of surrender / and woke on the flag of Japan” (ll. 11–12). The end rhymes of “surrender” with “tender” and “Japan” with “plan”—in the first and second lines respectively—are designed to produce a triumphant finale confirming the speaker's (and poet's) wit and ingenuity. It is an uncomfortable poem of poetic and physical domination. “Imperial” also exploits a reader's possible expectation that Paterson may have broader cultural or political points, but then undermines this hope with the bathos and irony of neat end rhymes and a crumpled flag. Paterson produces a little, well‐made poem: it is syntactically coherent, it deftly inhabits iambic meter, and is spoken from a confident (and creepy) singular perspective.

By contrast, Sheppard prefers what might be called open poems, with disruptive grammar and syntax; poems which exhibit or foreground their artifice and materiality. What Sheppard (2005, 142) later describes as “linguistically innovative poetry” also usually questions the stability of a unified speaking voice as well as subjectivity and identity. For example, Brady's (2005, 54) “Saw Fit” takes as its subject Lynndie England, a US soldier involved in the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. “Saw Fit” ventriloquizes a number of conflicting viewpoints, dramatized through the paratactic arrangement of a range of discourses:

Gitmo in legal twilight, red and green hazard

net the sea

scape beyond enduring

freedom, the nightly movie. Montage of flag,

soldier, airplane. Get more for your

money with American

express more blood from your nipples

(ll. 1–7)

There are several voices here–from advertising and politics, as well as contemporary argot—all jostling, none of which takes precedence. The artifice of the poem is foregrounded: enjambment, for example, is deliberately jarring, with single words interrupted to become phrases offering abrupt shifts of meaning. “American / express” becomes “express more blood” in a charged and brutal textual environment designed to shock. Unlike Paterson's Japanese flag, glimpses of American and British flags fracture and flex across the whole of the poem and form part of a strategically arranged montage, which the arrangement of lines reflects and which evokes the crude assemblages of tortured prisoners and props photographed by soldiers such as Lynndie England to take away as trophies. Paterson's perspective is fixed on his sexual conquest; Brady's mutates, shifts, and challenges. Brady's response to Paterson's introduction to this volume illustrates, therefore, that there are two dominant Urtext‐species in contemporary poetry, which act as framing contexts for many other species. These I shall call without apology: the orthodox and the innovative. As should be clear, Paterson favors and represents the orthodox; Brady, on the other hand, is of the innovative camp. Each flies a flag for very different poetic practices.