POETRY’S INSTITUTIONS ARE FAILING POETRY 

In 2007, Daisy Goodwin on BBC Radio 4 lamented the fact that it has been suggested poetry is becoming an art as irrelevant to society as Morris dancing — a sort of private hobby.  An exclusive, incestuous world.  But she is ‘not prepared to blame poets themselves, for being a poet today is hard enough as it is.’ I trust I quote her correctly.

When poetry was popular and an art central to public life, this was because it made people happy, sad, laugh, cry, shout for joy, be disturbed or consoled. Poetry today that is considered popular — now usually called performance poetry — appeals mostly to two of the above features only: it is funny and, therefore, makes people laugh; or it disturbs by either shocking or ranting about socio-political matters. For poetry that appeals to all the other human concerns one must resort to today’s more serious poets of greater breadth or concern but commanding smaller audiences. A situation that was not, I repeat, the case with popular poets of the past.

Poets, however, do not reach their natural audience any longer because real criticism is not encouraged, is absent.  In its place is either explanatory (scholarly) discourse about poems but not evaluating them; or poets themselves respectfully reviewing their fellow professionals in a culture of niceness.  The latter’s pandering to insecurity’s fear of rejection, however, is but a guarantee of mediocrity.

How has this situation come about? The philosopher George Santayana would certainly blame bureaucracy, ‘The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought’. In reality, however, it has largely occurred because of the triumph of literary politics over honest criticism.  In practice this situation has come about because (a) if practising poets honestly criticize their fellow poets — especially that of a ‘low-profile’ poet criticizing some ‘higher-profile’ poet — that criticism is automatically dismissed as sour grapes; or, if it is true what David Morley wrote in a recent issue of Poetry Review, namely, that ‘Most readers of poetry are poets or aspiring poets’, then mutual criticism of work is a thing to avoid; (b) if and when academics, and those poets of an academic bent, offer criticism of contemporary poetry invariably, on examination, such criticism can be seen to be a species of scholarly hermenuetics or interpretation;  and this is because the academic instinct is not one of caring but of curiosity.  The scholarly mind is not the critical mind; (c) If honest criticism of contemporary poetry is offered by a non-practising poet, or a non-academic — namely just a simple reader and appreciator of poetry — such a person’s views are dismissed as amateur and ‘not professional’ — especially by poets — and therefore of no consequence because such are not, themselves, poets. 

But, as Dr Johnson said somewhere, one doesn’t need to be a plumber to know when a tap is not working; nor, more contemporaneously, one doesn’t need to be a car mechanic to appreciate a breakdown.  Ergo, one does not need to be a poet to know when a poem is rubbish or of poor quality; nor, vice-versa, when a poem is of good quality.

Education or teaching has become central to poetry today: something strongly encouraged by all poetry’s institutions. But as Oscar Wilde said, while ‘Education is an admirable thing, it is as well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.’ And, certainly, with poetry having become little more than an aid to teaching language skills — as the well-known academic poet John Kinsella suggested it is not now a thing designed to ‘give pleasure’- it is hardly surprising that few outside the education industry have any interest in poetry.

All teaching disciplines aim to instruct in ‘how to do’ something: the singular exception being sex education where, it would appear, — to judge from expert pronouncements on the matter — the aim, oddly, is to teach how not to do a thing! Since poetry, like I have said, became a mere aid to teaching language skills, a whole industry, theory-driven, has come into being consisting of university courses in creative writing, plus a grassroots’ movement of workshops and poets-in-schools’ projects.

But like the aforementioned sex education — with which it has some affinities — poetry teaching is uncertain whether its aim is simply how to write poems, or how not to. Before poetry became an academic subject, the ‘how not to’ aspect was the province of the critic, and the ‘how to’ was the province of the poet. But as critics mostly mixed moral judgment (e.g. ‘this is a bad poem’) with practical observations upon the text of a poem (e.g. ‘this poem uses too many adjectives’), it became necessary to eliminate the role of the critic from teaching or, at least, to reduce his or her role to that of neutral observer of technique only. Which has resulted in a method of instruction that entirely ignores the aesthetic effect and, to a large extent, any focus upon musicality in poetry. 

The short answer to that most burning of questions concerning contemporary poetry, namely, why is contemporary poetry such a turn-off for most people, has to lie with the product itself.  When the general readership of books bothers to look in the more high-profiled poetry books, time and again they encounter what amount to designer confections that in no way satisfy or appeal to their basic, ingrained, traditional, emotional expectations of poetry.

How is this situation maintained?  And why must the ambitious young poet in these islands go to London to find out?  Well, with regards the latter it was ever thus. To parody the famous lines of Henry V,

                  If in poetry you would win
                  Then in London first begin.

The situation — much clearer to outsiders than insiders — is maintained by a few publishers (many but not all in London) and a lot of tax-payers’ money.  For all the good intentions of the Poetry Society — its constitution and those who carry it out — or of the Poetry Book Society, these institutions mostly reflect the status and editorial decisions of a few ‘big’ publishers — a number of which publishers are also funded by the taxpayer.  With regard to the two principal poetry awards in Britain — the T.S. Eliot and the Forward prizes — neither of which are direct beneficiaries of taxpayers’ money  (except the former is administered by the state-subsidized PBS) they, too, merely reflect this establishment-centred situation. And why? Because, no more than the PBS with its quarterly accolades upon certain books of poetry, do the organizers of prizes examine more than a fraction of  the books of poetry published in the UK in any year.  Why?  Because they are not organized to cope with the volume; and, thus, they too, have to rely on such short-cuts to assuring ‘quality’ as reliance on the imprimatur of the Arts Council and that of the few prominent commercial publishers — which, of course, is no assurance at all.

Another of poetry’s institutions, the Arvon Foundation, exists to meet a need for creative writing tuition of various kinds; and only a proportion of its Arts Council subsidy would relate to the ‘teaching’ of poetry.  Over the last quarter of a century there has been an ever-increasing demand for creative writing tuition, and many former polytechnics, now universities, and institutions of adult education, have begun to run — on a commercial basis — creative writing courses, even up to MA degree level.   Among other organizations — like Arvon and also subsidized — that have come into being recently has been the Poetry School based in London.  Lastly, there are a number of other creative writing courses subsidized by the Arts Council but too many to list.

The main point that needs to be emphasized is that, given the high demand for creative writing tuition, is it not time to consider the apparent anomaly of some courses needing subsidy and others not?  And should not this very question — plus others already raised — alert us to the possible need for some form of redistribution of Arts Council poetry funding?  I suggest it should.

For example, were the Arts Council to allocate specific funds solely to enable poetry book publishers — other than the few unsubsidized commercial publishers still publishing some poetry — to procure shelf-space in bookshops, as occurs with novels, poetry would again become more visible to the book-buying public. 

Similarly, the Arts Council could do more to improve accountability for funding which, in turn, would lead to quality improvement. For example, it could do a survey among poets who submit to little magazines and poetry publishers that are subsidized, to assess the varying lengths of time of editorial responses to work submitted.

Nor am I alone in having reservations about institutional thinking. John Holden, head of the Demos think tank for Culture, said he was ‘bothered’ by the McMaster report of the Arts Council entitled From Judgement to Measurement, which suggested that quality in the arts should be settled by self-assessment and peer assessment. As he said, ‘Our culture is a public culture and we may be experts but we should not be gatekeepers’. I agree. Peer judgement is invariably distorted by personal factors like friendship, personal enmity or prejudices which have nothing to do with the quality of art works.

Again, and referring to education once more, in the British Council’s annual report ‘There is virtually no reference to arts activities in non-classroom contexts’, according to the Arts Industry issue for August 2008. So, as of now, it seems to me that poetry’s institutions are letting poetry down, and these are some of the reasons as I have suggested.

This essay was taken from the text of a speech supporting a motion in debate at the 8th Torbay Poetry Festival, 2008.

A POET’S FUNERAL

       My friend Tony is a businessman who runs  a successful firm in Oxford. He has a holiday home in The Mount, Brixham. We have been friends for years. Not a literary man, Tony has, on account of our friendship (and his wife), found himself constrained to take an interest in poets — forced by circumstance he would argue. Every time he reads an obituary of a poet in the newspapers, he sends me a cutting accompanied by the words ‘Another one gone — drink again!’ Though not a poet himself, he has a lively interest in death.

       Somewhere around his fiftieth birthday, Tony said to me — I think it was one of those halcyon summer evenings in The Golden Lion on Brixham’s New Road –‘I find the first thing I turn to in the newspapers these days is the obituaries,’ he paused, ‘It must be my age. I find a lot of my friends do the same.’ Like I say, he has a lively interest in death. In fact, to try and mitigate the inevitable impact on himself of the Grim Reaper, Tony retired at fifty. Unfortunately, in his own words, he discovered after six months that he was ‘irreplaceable’ in both his own business and in his own eyes. Though I suspect that the truth was he grew so bored with tinkering with his vintage Bentley, his Rolls Royce, and the heating systems in his various houses, that this modest discovery of his own commercial indispensability was but an excuse. That, and the fact he dimly perceived like the sculptor Rodin that it is not sex or money but work which provides the best escape from death. At least, work puts out of mind the almost daily threats of mortality; and one never knows but that keeping really busy might just make one late for one’s own  funeral.

         Now death it was, too, and a poet or, rather, the death of a poet, that leads to another more episodic memory involving Tony. Tony that is, and his really nice wife Fran. They have been married longer than chalk and cheese, and have a loving scepticism towards each other that Tony — to the merriment of his friends — translates into a real Irish stew of hyperbole and fib, with the occasional seasoning of classic self-pity. Fran is very forbearing,  but Tony — as he will tell you — is ‘the tolerant one’.

         But to the little episode of the poet Sally Purcell’s funeral. I did not know the deceased poet well, but had gone to the funeral at the suggestion of  Peter Jay, her publisher, who assumed because I published a number of Sally’s poems in an anthology I edited that she and I were friends. In fact, I only met her once, and then briefly at the Oxford launch of that anthology in St. Peter’s College. The funeral service was at the Oratory in St. Giles.

         Unfortunately, because Patricia was supervising the installation of a new kitchen back at our house in The Mount, my wife and literary partner was unable to accompany me to the funeral. Like me, she had not known Sally Purcell beyond her poetry and a reputation for being somewhat fey, much in the way that the Christina Rossetti of  ‘Goblin Market’ seems fey to us. Not quite ‘away with the fairies’ but almost. Certainly Sally came over strongly in her poetry as a mental traveller in the medieval landscapes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Also, at our one meeting she seemed a highly neurotic, dowdy yet ethereal being, only a few degrees short of owning a broomstick. Sensitive and mysterious.

         Anyway, I took myself off the evening prior to the funeral to Boar’s Hill, Oxford where I stayed overnight with Tony and Fran. I remember telling them of the nightmare Christmas Patricia and I had just spent in Holland as the guest of an elderly homosexual, a delightful old poet full of energy, but given to spectacular collapses in public places. While Fran countered with the somewhat more mundane subject of a new house she had bought in North Oxford and which she was keen for me to see. Why this was I don’t recall, but I suspect it was because, like us all, she wanted to show off a new toy. As Hemingway would have said, ‘Some toy!’

         The next morning, after sharing hangovers at breakfast, Fran drove me to see this house which she was having renovated. Her husband is the supreme DIY man among my friends; and in his hands it doesn’t mean ‘Destroy It Yourself’. To describe the new house as an unexceptional Sixties’ style house is to praise it. A modern, nondescript, redbrick terraced house that may have had a flat roof. ‘Yes, er, very nice.’ I said to Fran, swallowing as little of her enthusiasm as decency would permit. Then we drove off in search of the Oratory church. Up and down the Woodstock Road, in and out St. Giles. In the end we stopped the car and asked a street cleaner. ‘Oh, yeah, that’s St. Aloysius’s wot yer wants. Over there, mate.’ He knew, as I had suspected he might. The notice board outside the church said in large letters ‘St. Aloysius’ Church’ and, in diminutive lettering in small brackets ‘(The Oratory)’. Had this, in the dim and distant past, been a takeover of one church by another? We didn’t know. But the two names had cost us an extra half hour’s driving. As it turned out, however, it didn’t matter because the Oratory was not yet open for burying, praying, hymning or anything else.

         Fran dropped me at the kerbside in St. Giles’s, drove off and I walked straight into an Army Recruiting Office in the belief that it was a café. No one pointed a rifle at me, but if they had I couldn’t have left quicker than I did. I have no objections to death, I just didn’t want to sign up to be a causer of it. Writing poems is quite stressful enough.

         As I turned down the street away from the Recruiting Office, I ran into Fred Beake and Douglas Clark — two poets from the city of Bath. They were going for a coffee, so I joined them. Fred is a Yorkshireman with the appearance of an Old Testament prophet  and has the only voice I have encountered that can grind words to powder. Douglas on the other hand is the taller of the two — a man from County Durham with a mild Scots’ accent: he wears spectacles that he likes frequently to move up and down his forehead like he was fixing a second pair of eyes on himself. He is a likeable, clerkly figure who was a computer expert or paid nerd at Bath University for many years.

         We turned into a ‘greasy spoon’ type of café, and there discovered Eddie Linden and John Heath-Stubbs already at a table, so we joined them. Eddie and John have been well-known fixtures on the London literary landscape for many years. John is a giant of a man, totally blind now, who resembles a large, grey statue. When he laughs, he throws his head back and giggles loudly to the ceiling. Eddie, by contrast, is a small man like an old-fashioned warped cricket bat. A temperamental Scot, he is given to telling everyone within hearing — especially when freely ‘oiled’, as he frequently is — that he is ‘gay, socialist and Roman Catholic!’ The latter a combination that not infrequently nonplusses his auditors who — fools that they are — expect some degree of consistency to validate human utterances. This highly colourful and highly coloured (whisky blended) Scotsman has been his blind friend’s eyes (not ears) for many years, steering Heath-Stubbs around the country to poetry readings and literary parties . John is a considerable poet of great learning and it should be an honour to be one of his acolytes.

         As we finished our coffees and prepared to walk the couple of hundred yards to the church, John expressed a wish to visit the toilet before we left. ‘Will ye take him William? It’s doonstairs. ‘Am nae so big an’ ye can handle him better.’ So ‘doonstairs’ to the toilets I took him. When we returned to the café from the basement our companions, including the ever ‘loyal’ Eddie, had left. So my steering of the Bard of  Notting Hill had to continue all the way to the church. Where, when we arrived slightly late and I had to force the great door open by great effort which led to an even greater noise, the entire congregation swivelled heads at us. Only the priest remaining motionless, his back to us and arms raised towards the altar. Our entry signalled the start of the Requiem Mass for Sally Purcell poet, lecturer in Medieval French and part-time barmaid at the nearby  King’s Head public house.

         It was at The King’s Head afterwards that the wake for Sally was held; and Eddie, whose great cadging skills quite failed to find transport for himself and John (everyone it seemed had left their cars at the out-of-town park-and-ride places), it again fell to me to get them to the pub. By taxi. And, of course, Eddie came once he knew I was paying.

         Peter Jay of Anvil Press, Sally’s publisher, Eddie, John, me, Douglas Clark, Fred Beake, Kit Wright, the late William Cookson, editor of that fine magazine Agenda, who was about to ‘come off the wagon’ and begin his last great drinking spree before his liver gave out and he ceased to be a liver, plus Val Warner — a poet more beautiful of nature than appearance — (forgive me Val wherever you are) who was a leading authority on the Edwardian poetess Charlotte Mew who, like Sylvia Plath but forty years earlier, committed suicide. Many others too whom I cannot now recall toasted Sally the Departed in her favourite pub.

          For some very odd reason to me, who that day utterly failed to organize myself, fell the task of getting various of the inebriated mourners’ journeys home arranged. I went and brought a taxi from St. Giles’s to take John Heath-Stubbs and Fred Beake to the London train — Beake was not going home to Bath that day. Then I had to get a seriously drunk and self-sorrowful Eddie Linden to Oxford Station: for some reason Eddie didn’t want to go back to London with John. Finally, at about 6.30pm. (the wake had begun about 1pm.), it occurred to me to ask myself where I was supposed to be going? Or, rather, Peter Jay wondered where I was to spend the night: enquired whether I was staying over in Oxford or going back to Devon that evening? Even then it was not for a while before I remembered that I was supposed to ring Fran, ‘At work before 5.30pm. Or at home not later than 6.30pm.’ It was another while before I could ring either place on the pub payphone — and then only with the kindly assistance of an Oxford legal don who had the requisite skills to understand the thing. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I discovered I had lost contact with my Boar’s Hill chums.

         As I partook of another drink, as the Irish would say, I recalled that it had been their intention to take me to The Butcher’s Arms in Headington, followed by ‘a curry’ somewhere. Brilliant! I was saved. I knew what to do. After taking an unsteady farewell of Peter and the legal don, I resorted yet again to the taxi rank in St. Giles. ‘Where to, mate?’ ‘The Busher’s Arms, pleesh.’ ‘Which Butcher’s Arms? There’s more than one.’ ‘Er, oh, the one at Headington.’

         The Butcher’s Arms is embedded in a large housing estate. And all estates are brick mazes designed to defeat everyone, especially poets and rent collectors. Pubs are their only landmarks and taxi drivers at least know them. So, eventually, I walked into The Butcher’s Arms, having paid my fare and, as the cliché has it, ‘the place was heaving’. It was like Saturday night in a Wild West saloon and I was a stranger just in town. Only a stranger in this case to whom nobody paid any attention. What could I do but shove my way to the bar; which I finally reached after a procession of ‘excuse mes’ and ‘thank yous’ mixed with the occasional ‘watch it mate!’ from the odd disgruntled drunk. As I was about to order at the bar, a voice screeched like a parrot behind me, ‘It’s the poet!’. Momentarily a shocked silence fell on those drinkers around me. Filled with wine and initiative I, too, looked around to see if I could spot a poet. I couldn’t. Only my own red visage in the mirror behind the bar.
         Out of the press of bodies and faces emerged Jackie. Then Dennis. Who were they? How did I know them? Friends of Tony and Fran. What do they look like? Jackie is an articulate,  afro-looking woman with silvery hair like a close-fitting Roman helmet. Dennis, a stocky guy with a beard, is a jazz fan who frequently makes about as much sense to his fellow humans as does his favourite music to a classical music buff. Which is to say that his outlook on life is decidedly improvisatory. He appears shocking or mad by turns even to his wife. But one can’t help liking them, as I do, and it was they who rescued me that evening. As Tony was to later put it, ‘Jackie and Dennis are good at taking in stray dogs. And there’s not much difference with poets.’

         However, before the three of us rattled off unsteadily to Jackie and Dennis’s luxury bungalow to meet their ferociously-loveable dog Chloe, plus a chicken roast, an attempt was made to locate Tony and Fran. This came about — the attempt that is — through another customer at the bar, who not only confirmed that my friends had been in the pub earlier looking for me, but also claimed that he ‘knew’ where they went for their Friday evening curries. This customer — who affirmed that he was ‘Tony’s technical director’ — spent some time on his mobile phone ringing round various Indian restaurants that dot Oxford like curry temples. But to no avail. While Alan, as Tony’s employee was called, carried out his telephone research I, to my amazement and no little surprise, was given a handful of  tokens by Dennis to procure myself ‘drinks on the house’.  Not wishing to seem ungrateful, I did as invited.

         To prove I was a poet and to sing for my supper, once we were at the bungalow I was prevailed on to give a poetry reading. This I did. And there survives a photograph taken by Jackie showing the mightily muscular small dog Chloe with one of my feet in its mouth, while I read aloud from a book in my hand. Indeed, it’s an  odd thing that -  the poet and dog ‘thing’. At  a reading I once gave in Kentish Town I had canine assistance of a sort there too. Throughout my reading — delivered from a small dais — a dog with one of its legs in plaster of paris insisted on walking up and down throughout: clumpertyclumpertyclumpertyclump (as James Joyce would have rendered it) — a sound much at variance with my pentameters.

         Fairly late on I rang the house on Boar’s Hill to let Tony and Fran — whom I rightly assumed would be home by then — my whereabouts. Said Tony, who answered the phone, ‘I told Fran you’d turn up sooner or later…You’d better stay where you are, We’ll bring you a change of clothes in the morning, then take you to the station. After that, if you get lost on the way home it’ll be Patricia’s responsibility. Goodnight!’

         It’s nice to have friends, I always say.