Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 64

Many of the species that Sampson (2012) outlines in her Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry can be grouped under what Sheppard refers to as poetries of the “Movement Orthodoxy.” Sampson describes, for example: “The Plain Dealers,” octogenarian poets such as Dannie Abse and Elaine Feinstein who “use familiar, lived‐in language” (13); “The Dandies,” poets of plain speak but who have a little more “linguistic fancy dress” (36), as she puts it; and “The Oxford Elegists,” poets such as Andrew Motion and John Fuller who produce a tone of high culture as well as an emotional register of “truth, decency and restraint” (58). Sampson's list of “Movement orthodoxies” is completed with “The new formalists” who write poetry, so she argues, which is “almost [the] complete opposite of today's widely published poetry of inertia.” Sampson's term, “inertia,” describes a kind of “notebook” poetry written by poets who “don't accept that making a poem involves transformational effort” (227). As a reaction to the abundance of such poetry, Sampson argues, “today, exploring and reviving strict form, Ciaran Carson, Mimi Khalvati and Don Paterson are leading the new formalism” (228). The new formalism uses traditional poetic meter as part of what appears to be a reactionary poetic practice and which results in poems such as “Imperial.”

Related to Sampson's designation of “notebook” poetry, as well as the type of light, metrical and rhyming verse often produced by progenitors of species in the “Movement Orthodoxy” is a pervasive form of contemporary light verse. A good deal of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry (our current Poet Laureate) falls into this category. Hence, the opening of Duffy's poem, “Prayer” (Paterson and Simic 2004, 51):

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itself. So, a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

(ll. 1–4)

The “sudden gift” of the metaphor at the end of the stanza offers a little, darkening twist for a reader, but the rest of the poem relies on its unassuming language and its simple, poignant scene to evoke a reader's sympathy. As Wheatley (2015, 88) has observed, there is only a little skip from poems like “Prayer” to “poetry of light entertainment in the tradition of [John] Betjeman and Pam Ayers.” Paterson's description of the poetry market in his introduction to New British Poetry illustrates his alignment of “Mainstream” verse with the values of market capitalism, namely: products should be easily accessible and consumable and the quantity of their consumption determines their value. In The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson (1983, 93) notes how once dominant genres, “along with so many other institutions and traditional practices, fall […] casualty to the gradual penetration of the market system and money economy.” As a consequence, poetries courting simplicity and ease and evoking ideologies of common feeling are liable to be easily reified into products. This, in turn, often makes them indistinguishable from species of light verse: they frequently use the same formal devices and register as what might be called “ad‐verse,” that type of whimsical poetry used in adverts to sell fast food.

While Sampson draws on an admirably wide field of poetic practice in her book, innovative poets are under‐represented. However, her category of the “Exploded Lyric” does try to account for types of poetry which, Sampson argues, is characterized by “an implicit, and sometimes an explicit, critique of most mainstream poetics” (258). Sampson's descriptions of the poetry published by presses such as Equipage, Reality Street, and Shearsman resemble Paterson's in that she views it as reactive and negative. Sampson and Paterson do not see the point in this poetry. Indeed, this may be because their conception of poetry's function is contrary to the aims of those poets they seek to marginalize. While Sampson and Paterson seem to advocate safe, transparent, and unchallenging poetries, much of the work they either ignore or denigrate is motivated by the aim to fold into its formal practices a critique of contemporary poetics as well as social and political conditions. Such critique results in the kind of poetry Sinclair advocates and describes in the preceding text. As Redell Olsen (2007, 43) suggests of orthodox verse, “lyric sensibilities and commitment to normative syntax do not allow for the kind of radical questioning of the limits of representation itself which are key features” of linguistically innovative or experimental artworks. Poets writing innovative poetry very often have, as Olsen goes on to argue, “different priorities than those of the dominant market forces.” In other words, they resist the reification of their artworks into easily consumable commodities.

Sampson registers this resistance as a constituent part of innovative poetry when she observes that it might be considered as “practice, [and] one whose poetics may exist more in the process than the product” (271—emphasis in the original). In his puckish, free‐wheeling, and awkward introduction to his edited collection of innovative poetry, Dear World and Everyone in It, Nathan Hamilton (2013, 17) remarks that, “The Editor had the idea that some new terms were needed.” While he does not acknowledge Sampson as a source of his “new terms,” he continues (using her exact terms): “So, let's say there are two general modes of U.K. and U.S. poetry: ‘Product’ and ‘Process’.” After a lengthy paragraph outlining the distinctions between the two types of poetry (which mirror those I have suggested between orthodox and innovative), Hamilton gets impatient:

But “Product” and “Process” represent the modern creep of business and corporate language and ideology into all areas of thought and work – dismiss them from your mind entirely.

(18)

Hamilton's intervention in his own argument captures the spirit and anxieties of many of the poets and poems represented in his volume. Classification and the use of “corporate” terms freighted with the ideology of the marketplace are to be avoided and outflanked wherever they are detected. And, like Bergvall's poem which begins this chapter, many of the poems Hamilton collects resist ease of classification, consumption, and interpretation. Hence, Hamilton publishes a sequence of poems called “Who Not to Speak To” by Marianne Morris, which offers visually arresting commentaries, interventions, musings, and reflections on contemporary culture and politics as well as on the act of writing itself (I quote from Morris's original publication):

SUCH PASSIONS ABOUND

in the CYPBERSPHERE!

On the Have Your Say website,

Pitt‐Palin Pacified Rice Thatcher's

face is embroiled in a botox debate

about one hundred and sixty four people having

a debate about the Have Your stick insect

Say

talentless, jealous, single women and haters are

embroiled in a patriotic debate

about themselves

a digital mirror sputters

the lines rage aimless

the passion is aimless.

(Morris 2009, 4, ll. 1–14)

The poem is striking, with visual properties designed to evoke the type of affective reaction and sensationalism of newspaper headlines and clickable, online advertorials. Morris mimics media conventions, for example, the way in which TV collapses the high and low debate into sensationalized formulas ready to be wheeled out at any time. There is a “botox debate” but also a “debate about” “having / a debate” as well as a debate “about themselves,” with the repetition replicating the formulaic production of vacant debate and implying a concomitant hollowing out of our engagement of such; we consume debates regardless of their content. But, Morris is not writing from a secure position of privilege; she is complicit in, and part of, the processes she describes. Hence, the poem turns on itself toward the end, registering an enervation around the futility of rage. This deflation is mirrored, like the “digital mirror” sputtering, in the “aimless” placement of lines (just as the emboldened, italicized, and enlarged words appear arbitrary). Poetic production falters after such energetic inhabitation of media modes as well as parodic critique of such; it is a poetics which exhausts itself.

Comprising a range of discourses and poetic techniques, “Who Not to Speak To” is difficult to classify as representative of any one genre or species. Corcoran (2007, 4) suggests that this unclassifiability might be a particular feature of contemporary poetic practice. He notes, for example, how many of the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth‐Century English Poetry contain a preponderance of words relating to contradiction, such as “division,” “difference,” and “discrepancy,” and acknowledges that many poems of the past half century “appear to speak against themselves, to engage in sometimes fraught dialogues of the self with the self, or of the poem with its own origins, traditions and generic characterisations” (my emphasis). These poems, Corcoran argues, “become the scenes of anxieties, tensions, distresses, uncertainties, contentions, and mobilities.” It is the mobility and protean nature of innovative or experimental poetry that makes it difficult to classify; only a term such as Urtext‐species will do. Innovative poetry questions the whole enterprise of genre classification; critiquing classification is its default imperative. In “History and Genre,” Cohen (2014, 53) suggests that “genre concepts in theory and practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons.” Since the 1960s, the Western world has experienced the unprecedented and largely unchecked exponential growth of global market capitalism. Since the 1960s, innovative and experimental poets have used poetry and poetic form to think through a whole range of theoretical, cultural, social, and political issues. In innovative poetry, then, self‐consciousness is part of a critique of common assumptions about language and the stable self against a background of consumer capitalism. Good contemporary poetry will have a sophisticated understanding of its complicity in a late capitalist world of rampant consumption and competitiveness and will offer a reader glimpses of an awareness of such, as well as imaginative alternatives. As Corcoran (2007, 5) puts it: “Modern poetry, it seems, is nowhere more characteristic of itself than when anxiously but scrupulously doubting itself.” And perhaps this doubt, and this evasion of becoming a product, works against the very act of literary classification.