Andrew Duncan

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Biographical note:  Andrew Duncan studied as a mediaevalist and started writing in punk fanzines. Has been publishing poetry since the late 70s, including In a German Hotel, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Sound Surface, Surveillance and Compliance. He was one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and now reviews regularly for Poetry Review. He writes “I failed to discover modern English poetry until late in life, because of the silence in which this wonderful poetry is buried.”

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857578
ISBN-10:  1876857579
ISBN-13:  9781876857578
Author:  Andrew Duncan
Title:  The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jul-03
Extent:  356pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  20 mm
Weight:  534 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 19.99
Price:  USD 29.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  How modern is modern? How does the new come to be the surface which makes the personality visible? How does an offset become a peak? One of the key differences in the poetry world is between those who see a stream of innovation over the last 50 years, a source of hope and renewal at each moment, and those who see innovation as self-willed and unnecessary, so that poems in the style of the 50s still “look up to date”. There seems to be a lot of confusion about this issue: this book is an attempt to improve the quality of debate by describing the stylistic innovations since 1960, giving dates to the changes, and fitting them into the horizon of a time – a unique composite of collective ideas, wishes, or projections, evanescent and rich in fine interactions. An ample accumulation of descriptive and comparative material allows us, finally, to detect what is innovative and what is not – and gives us a technical vocabulary with which to describe poems, capturing them as art-historical objects, before or beside aesthetic judgment. Probes into the zone of conservatism allow us to identify it as a form of melancholia, a collective rancour, a thermal death, a distrust of consciousness – a modern disease which thrives on islands. Finally, we stumble into the zone of what isn’t clear yet, or hasn’t happened, in order to flourish the names of poets to whom the future may belong.

Table of contents:
Introduction; or, anxiety before entering a room
Chapter One
Versions of the Chronology of Style
Chapter Two
Form, Time, Fashion
Chapter Three
Poverty of Desire: Poetry in the 1950s
Chapter Cour
Blowing Your Mind: Immediacy in the Sixties
chapter Five
From the Counter-Culture to Personal Politics: speculation and experiment, 1967-75
Chapter Six
The Gothic Strain in Seventies Poetry
Chapter Seven
The 1980s: Neo-conservatism and cheap information
Chapter Eight
An era of rising property values: Conservatism 1979-97
Chapter Nine
Poetry in the 1990s
Afterword
Bibliography
Index

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From the Introduction

No modern British poet has an international reputation. Studying the translation lists of French or German publishers, or an attempt to form an Atlas of modern world poetry, brings home the gap when Graves, Eliot, or Auden are positively the youngest of “ours” on the lists. Editors from these countries have a good command of English, and ready access to the books put out by the visible organs of culture; but they just aren’t interested.

When Australians and Americans talk about British poetry or culture, it is generally the oldness which has struck them. It is annoying, of course, for someone who feels, and is, young to be told by someone older than they are that their thoughts are old. All the same, the serene detachment from the next segment of history, as compared with the segments we have had already, can also be an indifference to your own part in it, and consequently inhibit you from writing serious and ambitious poetry; a collective hostility to innovation is also a hostility to young poets. Formal conservatism may be a symptom of anxiety and lack of a personal voice; in fact, of an inability to write naturally.

It is half a century since any British poet acquired a world-wide reputation; maybe the world is wrong, and maybe British society, or a certain subdivision of it called the culture industry, has been hostile to new poets and has crushed the life out of them; reducing them to paranoia; forcing them to do other work to make a living; forcing them to write in conventional and light modes or go unpublished. Part of this could be due to excessive love for dead writers; all, or most, British poets go through a phase of love for the past, which builds up to a traumatic shock of realising that they have to write contemporary verse because they themselves are a contemporary person. This is less traumatic for an Australian or American. Excessive love for the past leaves less psychological space for thinking about the future; at the worst, this makes you become a scholar, forking over the creativity of the past, and abandoning and suppressing your own creativity. Pastiche and antiquarianism are national characteristics, as well as being neuroses.

Unease and evasion are often signalled by writing about archaeology. If a British poet writes about old churches, it gives a message of faintness, exhaustion, despair almost to the point of depersonalisation. Anxiety can be signalled either by talking about yourself or by being completely unable to talk about yourself. Despite the vast and expensive machinery of cultural conservation, the Ruins Management in which most of our leading cultural figures are employees, nothing is being added to the ruins. We are separated from the tradition by a huge gulf even as we take American tourists on guided walks around it. The ruins want living people only as conservators, scrupulously performing madrigals and Jacobean plays, only as servants, solemnly reciting the words of the dead, not as creators. The inclination of world literary opinion to agree that English literature has stopped goes along with the collapse on home grounds of pre-modern English poetry (say 1900-1960), or of our relationship to it. Who can read anthologies like British and American Poetry 1900-1950 (edited by Cecil and Tate), or The Penguin Book of Mid-century Verse (1918-60), edited by Allott, or English Poetry 1900-1940, edited by Strong and C Day Lewis, and take them seriously? Modernity is a vague and overblown term, a terrifying ghost whose name we give to the wreckage which has engulfed so many cultural projects, or to the failure of 20th C British poetry. A basic rule of English culture is that something is more valuable the older it is; accurate observation of this rule has not enabled conservative poets to find a market, or to construct something durable from materials that have endured, perhaps, too much. Rule no.99 may have been that connoisseurship of the old is so esteemed that no-one will face humiliation by liking a contemporary fake. Unsold in some warehouse, we can perhaps find the genuinely contemporary, a string of masterpieces too volatile and transformed to reach the shops and the shoppers.

Review quote:  … Duncan is an honest and unevasive critic. He makes an intelligent case for writers who have been poorly served by other critics, when they have deigned to notice them at all, and shows the reader whose only knowledge of British poetry comes from anthologies that the contemporary canon need not be the way it appears, and that real alternatives exist.

David Wheatley
The Times Literary Supplement

Review quote:  Duncan's work is exciting, original, valuable and full of fascinations, enthusiasms and energy. It bounds with life and hope. The first thing it deserves is to be debated, and the very last, cold-shouldered. Duncan has a busy, active, provocative mind; and there's such a wealth of stimulating, controversial and topical material here that it can't easily be ignored or dismissed except by those with vested interests of their own to hide.

Richard Burns
Poetry Review

Review quote:  I agreed with Andrew Duncan’s argument in his The Failure Of Conservatism In Modern British Poetry with regards to Larkin […] many young contemporary poets still appear to be writing under the sign of Larkin – all safe and sensible…. Larkin who despised Modernism and [after the grafted-on volcanic eruptions stoked up by Ezra Pound] returned English poetry to its current domestic solipsism. My writing through of Larkin seemed to produce a bizarre hybrid of Tristan Corbière and perhaps, early Barry McSweeney. It was also conceptual – using an entire Larkin book as template – the ghost of iambic pentameter [ ‘the first heave is to rid ourselves of the pentameter’- Pound] lingering behind lines utterly [inimical] to Larkin's perview – as if the English mainstream and the English avant-garde traditions were having a punch-up. Which they are, amongst other things.

Matthew Caley
Magma Magazine