So Where Did the Magic Go?

Fizzling Out

Art appreciation is eroded by the absence of strong social ideas of what defines good or bad art. According to an article on the Burmese regime’s censorship in 1994, the word ‘sunset’ was banned during the reign of military dictator Ne Win’s rule, because his name meant ‘brilliant as the sun’. This set me thinking how a nation’s ability to value its poetry and poets is in proportion to that nation’s level of censorship, simply because of the scrutiny afforded the written word. As censorship grows, so too the perceived threat from writers.

Under regimes like that of Burma writers are given a strong flow to work upstream against or to float along with and thereby a yardstick –a moral one – for the quality of their writing. The work produced is important for what is said, more than how it is said, but that’s not to say the work is aesthetically dead. Writers like Osip Mandelstam, or Gao Xinjian, are all the more astonishing for their technical ability alongside the content they express.

The opposite is true of liberal western societies: we’ve ended up with a culture unable to decide on the quality of our country’s art except by the commercial value attached to a piece, or through the passing of time. How can you qualify cultural production when there is no social scale strong enough to validate poetry? Neither aesthetics nor content are scrutinised to much extent. Large advances or impressive sales figures are a way of indicating that a text has been endorsed by a publishing house, or by the masses, but this is no guarantee of the intrinsic quality of the writing.

Previous eras had clearer social beacons against which to hold up their art: Plato’s Republic established its own criteria and concluded the mimetic arts were immoral. Sir Philip Sidney’s counter-arguments rested upon similarly moral grounds. The dialogue between Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley a couple of centuries later, adjusted what were essentially religious moral arguments for a more rational, post-Enlightenment society. Art had a responsibility to uphold social values and laws, which were based upon morality. Writing poetry – as a political act or as a parlour game – meant you would be read through a moral lens.

The same is no longer true today; the scaffolding has been pulled away. De Sade’s writing is a joke, barely able to offend. A moral defence of poetry is risible. Grey areas abound, multiple perspectives and conflicting interpretations vying for ascendancy; all well and good if you’ve the time and interest to dedicate, but not so good for casual readers. The dominant trend in the west – money – becomes the only clear-cut response to contemporary writing. Alternatively, you wait for copyright to expire, which removes vested interests, and see what survives, what turns to dust.

Worse still, in a time when a single poetry press might bring out anywhere between twenty and a hundred, or more, titles a year, each with countless love poems inside, where do you go to find the poems that might appeal to you most? To a book called something like The Nation’s Favourites?

The low end of the scale of language quality seems to have gone the other way, though. Today’s media hover over celebrities, politicians and journalists, waiting for them to say something wrong. In fact, policing of bad language is probably at an all-time high. Capitalism has pushed a disproportionate amount of money towards monitoring people’s use of libellous language. This strange degree of censorship is building purely on the level of content, but very little is happening at the top end of the scale to promote quality use of language.

Poetry criticism, meanwhile, is failing poetry’s readership, which is not to call it a general, common, or elite readership, to put people on a scale along with the art, but to say that anyone who might pick up a book of poetry, anyone who likes reading, is being let down by a critical environment which can’t appeal to a higher order of quality. You could lay the blame with poetry critics, or poetry’s social circles, as Dana Gioia does, but this is ungenerous. There are good critics out there, critics who maintain that their duty is to serve readers first and foremost, to communicate their taste and the motivations behind their taste, as clearly as possible. But perhaps it is the height of arrogance to step forward with a measure for all poetry today and say, ‘This is what readers need now, this is how all poetry should be judged.’

Damp Squibs

‘From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order.’ (TS Eliot, Harvard Lectures, 1932–3)

TS Eliot wrote extensively and brilliantly about the philosophy of poetry criticism but repeatedly fell back upon a conservative sense of religious moral value. He pointed to Johnson, Coleridge and Dryden as examples of poets serving poetry, rather than readers serving other readers. This is what is lacking today: a critic able to assess the contemporary and traditional poetry map and provide other readers – not just other poets, but other readers – with waypoints through the landscape.

Don Paterson’s misleading but imaginative 2004 TS Eliot lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ claims ‘Poetry is a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world.’ That might be a path through the maze of contemporary poetry: to what degree does it change our perception of the world? This is too simple, of course, yet another of the many slogans thrown about by poets on poetry. What if I went about wearing 3D specs all day long? That would change how I perceive the world. Is that Poetry?

Paterson’s statement is weak critical thinking; the comparison does nothing for poetry, which becomes agenda-led, showing ‘palpable designs’ as it ‘tries to change’ people. Paterson doesn’t respond to tradition either – in this case, Keats holding forth against poetry with premeditated ideas about the world and how to be in it. Keats’ statement is an important one, one that still holds true in defining our contemporary tastes; the idea fits well with a society that mistrusts moral hierarchies.

The reason past critics like Keats still hold so much power in defining how we appreciate poetry, is that the modern critic, like the modern poet, is so often just one clamouring voice amongst a multitude. There is little to distinguish one from the other. Witness the celebrity critic, Clive James, or any number of celebrity poets: these are attempts to distinguish through personality, rather than poetics. Is Felix Dennis’ poetry actually acceptable, if it comes with a free glass of wine? Without knowledge of the tradition of infinitely better nonsense verse his writing can be associated with, some might hesitate to call his poetry crap.

Coleridge’s notion of ‘the best words in the best places’ is a useful way of understanding the aesthetic appreciation of poetry. Poetry can and should be separated from more fleeting uses of language; it is crafted, a construct or representation. But Coleridge’s statement has aged badly. The idea carries an element of faith in the ideal, but today we can no longer choose the best words and arrange them in the best order, because who’s to say your love poem about a winter’s day is any better than Shakespeare’s summer’s day poem? Any poet still holding onto the idea of ‘best expression’ must work within relative constraints: best for who they are at that moment; best they can manage with their ability; ‘That’s the best I can do because I have to go out and earn some money and can’t spend any more time on it.’

Contemporary critics that stand out can be knocked over like dominoes: Ruth Padel, though ambitious, limits herself and her readers’ ability to appreciate a poem, by leading people by the nose through poem after poem, like Leavis crossed with Hovis, factory-produced, sliced bread interpretations of poem after poem. Dana Gioia, similarly, can be thrown out for his misreading of past critics, such as Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader essays; he bases his anti-elitist arguments on one of the most elitist statements in twentieth century poetry criticism, coming across as someone who wants to be loved for poetry, instead of someone who wants to help readers love poetry. These critics stand out for their sales, their reputations, and the size of their readerships – not for the quality of their writing.

These are well-known, easy targets. None have taken ascendancy in the way that Eliot, or any of the critics Eliot praised, did in their own times. What is missing is a critic able to express the hierarchical order we are missing, a critic able to measure today’s society and to establish an acceptable coda on how modern readers can choose which poetry sits on their bookshelves.

Drying the Spark Plugs

Further on in Paterson’s lecture he states that poetry ‘aims to make the texture of our perceptions malleable’ . This is almost a good description for the surprise and excitement I felt in reading John Mateer’s work. Better yet, I would say Mateer’s work makes textures which become malleable in the reader’s perception. Throughout his poetry runs the sense of language as a manifesting physical energy, protean, moving and dangerous; words can turn emotions into physical forces, paranormal objects that glow and float around pathways at night, or conjure, delude, charm and compel. This is a poet watching language’s magic at work, then describing their findings with awe and reverence.

Reading John Mateer’s selected poems, Elsewhere (Salt, 2007), it is easy to imagine a world in which language still matters. He by no means draws his influence or experience from either authoritarian or liberal societies exclusively; his is a nomadic poetry, drawing on life in South Africa, where he was born, as well as Japan, Australia, North America, Indonesia and Mexico, producing poetry in each of these places. The important point for me in reading his work is that he doesn’t suffer from censorship, but neither does he operate without a moral order: quite the opposite. As the back cover blurb says, he has produced ‘one person’s poetic and moral accounting of the past five hundred years of Western colonization.’

His poetry globe-trots, crossing national borders as well as ideological boundaries of class, identity and race. His writing reveals an international language that bypasses hierarchies of ‘best’ and ‘worst’ to establish its own framework for aesthetic quality. When Mateer uses non-English words, particularly in his titles, there’s a sense that the poems are inviting discussion, that the reader needs to sit down with a native speaker who understands the words being used, or recognises the places – Karoo Night, Makwerekwere, Takbiran, Osore-Zan, Casa de los Azulejos – and debate the finer points of culture and inflection. A guidebook just isn’t sufficient.

Linguistic difference is a way of relativising what is said. A white South African commentating on a closed society like Japan’s could easily be constricted and politicised, but here overcomes simplistic readings to create cultural understanding, investigation. One example is in his writing about racial difference in South Africa, such as in ‘Ethekweni’, where his white narrator holds a ‘pale, grotesque’ hand up to a black revolutionary poet’s, asking, ‘Why, without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?’ The italics show language coming alive, off the page; the speaker addresses the reader directly, jolting them out of complacency, not allowing the poem to be nodded at politely and forgotten.

This writing has to cross a minefield of potential mistakes: condescension (Keats’ palpable designs, again), fence-sitting (as levelled at Seamus Heaney in the past), racism, or misinformation to name a few. Writers that survive the scrutiny that comes with tackling today’s grand narratives – alongside Mateer, South African writers like JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer – are people who have taken responsibility for their words in the face of morally complex subjects. They strive for the best, within the many opportunities for writing badly, and succeed.

Writing about writing is often sneered at, particularly the type that talks naively about the act of writing, the experience of writing, as if the poet is awed by their own constructions. Mateer, however, produces poems about language’s capacity to surprise, to coil and uncoil, or to be a pathway with a narrative and a transition to it. His unique perspective on language, expressed time and again throughout his work, can be seen clearly in ‘That Voice’:

         Is the voice that calls out
Mister! Mister! Mister!
a memory
separate from the images of the beggar
         with withered legs whose arm reaches through the grille,
who grabs and grabs
at me across the space of my mind?

The incantation, Mister, actually brings the beggar to life, manifests in the real space of the mind. This is the place where language has life, can be interpreted; and the space where an exile retreats to when the language barrier disconnects them from their society. The grille between reality and thought is one which can be penetrated by language.

Aesthetically, the poem does what the content does; it reaches out through the bars of the page, with its surprising line, grotesque image that seems to want to touch the reader, force the reader to recoil. The idea might be quite simple, perhaps even overstated, but this is a rare and precious approach to writing. Mateer chooses his structures carefully to pack charge into the words.

Similarly, he enhances the charge in his writing by using speech marks and italics to emphasise phrases, as I mentioned already. Used badly, italicising can be a sign of a writer unable to use context to inflect, but Mateer deploys confidently, not bothering to stress non-English words like izithakazelo, or bakkie, but highlighting language when it appears in the world of the poems as speech, or graffiti. The shift between narrative voice and found language further heightens the manifesting magic of words.

The release modernism (and ensuing responses) has given us today is permission to react to language as if it is valid experience: as valid as reality, or even more so. No longer an alternative to real life, language is a part of real life, of potential experience and can be treated as such in art. Not just words; all art has been elevated to the status of primary experience. Mateer’s writing puts this idea into practice.

By contrast, taking a poem recently published in The Guardian by Burmese poet Zargana, it is easy to see how aesthetics, though not absent, are secondary to the intended reading.

With row upon row of iron bars,
They can cage me.
With the heat of seven suns,
They can roast me.
With a battalion of ogres
They can guard me.
But if I took my scarlet blood
And sprayed it all across the sky
The bars would melt
The ogres kneel
Their suns kowtow before me.

(‘My Blood Oath by Zargana’, 11.11.88 The Saturday Poem from The Guardian Online, Saturday October 13 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/oct/13/featuresreviews.guardianreview32)

I could, if I wanted to, pretend this poem was written by a British poet attempting to capture the spirit of authoritarian government. I could then tear it to pieces, for its lack of musicality, the mundane imagery and the banal treatment of a sensitive subject. I could pick up on the Tolkien-esque ogre and the melodramatic quantity of blood as negative traits. The poem, ultimately, doesn’t deliver something I didn’t expect. It does, however, elicit empathy.

So instead I can acknowledge the incredible personal risk being taken by making such a bold statement, the rich emotional current in the poem that is almost a call to arms. I could embrace the tone, the voice of a martyr speaking, by also accepting that Zargana may have faced, or still faces, physical or psychological torture as a result of writing this piece. Then I could get in touch with Avaaz and PEN International to see how I could contribute to their campaigns. The poem, published for a UK audience, demonstrates the difference in how societies read, based on the importance placed on language. Mateer transcends his local boundaries, while many poets, or poems, do not.

The problem for the liberal west is that we lack dominant standards for rating the quality of the language we read.  Should Zargana’s poem be celebrated for its message, or weighed again a variety of inconclusive aesthetic and critical perspectives? All well and good in the academies, but who has the time for this outside of academies? Fiscal standards have therefore become a kind of last resort; but commercial value is too distinct from artistic value. As Lewis Hyde writes: ‘All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has been a subject of debate since before Aristotle’ (The Gift, 160)

Mateer’s writing is a landmark towards which readers can steer. Perhaps his writing lacks complexity, or even musicality, at times, but this in itself sets his poems apart from the glut of poetry that relies too much on style, too little on substance. He has travelled enough of the world to have captured that spirit of potency which comes from cultural inclusion and exclusion; what his poetry really does, therefore is surprise the reader by choosing to write about something different to so much of the poetry I’ve read, in a different style, and to do so excellently.

Reignition

‘I think it is the job of the artist to find new language to express the world, their ideas... If you don’t take an anti-stance to art that has gone before you, there is no way to renew art, or revolutionise. You can do it without denying what has gone before. I don’t seek to subvert tradition.’ (Gao Xingjian, Warwick Arts Centre lecture, May 2008)

In order to learn, human beings need to experience the new, to experience something beyond what they already know, be it through reading or in the real world. That’s only the first step of course; understanding and assimilation must follow. When a society takes a stance against the new it takes a stance against the intellectual growth of its members.

With so much poetry online and in print, today’s society demands that new products, cultural or commercial (though I appreciate this polarity is still questionable while the existing social order is in place), must be refreshing, must stand out, and do so intelligently. Subversion isn’t enough, nor is transgression. So many non-UK writers are introduced to UK readerships as nothing more than foreign versions of home-grown poetics. Meet x, a Polish poet, or y, a St. Lucian poet, who both write like z, from London. If you like z, you’ll like x and y. Where is the joy in this? There is no surprise, no delight in the reading. For ‘oak’ read ‘jacaranda’. For ‘London’ read ‘Delhi’. For ‘occasional, lyrical I’, read exactly the same, because nothing has changed in the poetics.

With the moral measure gone from how we read poetry in the liberal west, and a society lacking a confident idea of how to assign value to language, the onus is left on the reader to decide for themselves how to prioritise the poetry they read. Equally, readers must also decide which of the many struggling critics put forward by mass and local media they should trust.

And yet, art is only one measure of the health of a nation; more importantly, bank balances, or economic growth, are not the only measures. Placing these side by side, I have to ask what the purpose is in measuring artistic value. Is it so we can commercialise art more effectively? In order to better educate people (which evokes, the moral spirit of Sidney’s argument)? Or simply so that readers will not have their time wasted so much by books that bring them no pleasure?

In reading John Mateer, I found that surprise, astonishment and delight in the unexpected are vital factors in all the reading I do. The minute I find a poem too recognisable, or derivative, it fades into the landscape as just another tree in the forest. While ‘surprise’ is perhaps not the most original of critical lenses through which to view poetry, it is an offering that will hopefully spark a debate. Culturally, liberal western societies use conservatism to slow down progress, which might well be a useful tool if the alternative is rushing headlong into the unknown, but this can easily overstep into stasis. Conservatism at the ideal is equable with decay; the less we cultivate growth in fresh imaginative ventures, the less we are able to cope with a world that will go on evolving without us.