Simon Turner - War Poetry Thoughts (1)

In the run-up to a planned review of Alice Oswald's new contraction of the Iliad, Memorial, in the next week or so, I thought I'd set down some thoughts I'd been having on the question of war poetry as a means of framing some of the more outrageous claims I'm likely to make about the poem.  First of all, Philip Larkin (look at him there, with his face and his suit, all gussied up like a tax inspector on the first of April), who, in a 1963 review of Wilfred Owen's Collected Poems, made this fascinating commentary on the cultural status of the war poet: "A 'war' poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate war but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him: he is chained, that is, to a historical event, and an abnormal one at that.  However well he does it, however much we agree that the war happened and ought to be written about, there is still a tendency for us to withhold our highest praise in the grounds that a poet's choice of subject should seem an action, not a recation."  (The review in question appears in Required Writing.)

Given the almost religious character of war remembrance, and the seemingly high regard that Owen and Sassoon are held in, Larkin's reading of the field might seem to be wildly counter-intuitive.  Aren't 'the war poets' (always the poets of the trenches, of course, never Douglas or Jarrell or their equivalents from other conflicts) taught with clockwork regularity throughout the school curriculum?  Hasn't 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' taken on the status of a kind of alternative national hymn?  Well, yes, that's true, but on closer inspection, Larkin has a point, and a troubling one.  The speechmarks around 'war' in the opening sentence of the quotation I've chosen say it all: war poets are bracketed off from the mainspring of 20th century poetry, critically and culturally.  Where they're taught, they're taught in terms of content, not form: a generalised fog of cliches envelopes the work of Owen and his fellow trench-poets, summed up by the catch-all term 'the horror of war'.  There's comparably little room to consider, say, Owen's musical innovations (the half-rhyme), or the problematic place of the war poets within the bipartisan literary politics of the period.  The very designation 'war poet' means that we don't have to trouble ourselves with these questions.   

In a way, war poetry is beset by the same problem of any perceived deviation form or genre: it becomes ghettoised the moment it is clarified and named.  (Or even earlier: consider how HG Wells' fictions were classified as 'scientific romances' before science fiction existed as a publishing category: rather than treating them as literature, pure and simple, works such as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man were forced into the straightjacket of an existing literary mode.)  And although the demarcations of genre help critics and readers to find a path through what might otherwise be an incomprehesibly complex field, they can also be incredibly limiting.    

Simon Turner - Multiple Things

Philip Larkin: Britain's greatest postwar writer. Apparently.

There is a very interesting article in the current issue of Pomegranate, in which Emily Tesh lays into the notion that the sole function of any young poet is the finding of one's voice. Tesh's chief complaint, aside from the argument that the critical focus on voice is an example of lazy reading, is that sticking to one voice fails to reflect the multiplicity of the world as it is currently lived by the majority of people. She writes:

"If I had to describe what life in the twenty-first century is like to a passing time-traveler, I’d call it multiple. Different media are everywhere, blaring a hundred thousand different messages that reach our ears as a dizzy mess of thoughts and fashions and brands. The world wants us to know that iPod and iTunes are meant to be together like attractive models making out, that McDonalds eaters everywhere are lovin’ it, that you should just do it, that property prices are rising or falling again, that all right-thinking people hate the Iraq war and George Bush, that all right-thinking people hate immigrants and gays, that Elton John went to a party last night and that people are starving in Africa, that shares in X company rose point three percent the other day and that this is the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah and that that was My Chemical Romance with Teenagers and that COMING SOON from New Line studios and that A-levels are being devalued and that A-levels are just fine and that you should look both ways before crossing the road..."

Work written according to the precepts of voice within this epoch is automatically a failure, precisely because it is an exception to the rule of modernity. If novels, movies, and kid's cartoons can keep up with the pace of technological and communicative change, why not poetry? It's a sound argument, and one which - perhaps accidentally - manages to restate some central issues in the ongoing clash of civilizations between the mainstream and the alternative poetry scenes. On the other side of the Atlantic, Ron Silliman made much the same argument in a post on his own blog back in 2003 (March 14 to be exact):

"Imagine the life experiences of a person relatively unfamiliar with poetry coming to a reading in the United States the year 2003. This person lives in a society in which the Talking Heads had a hit record singing the zaum poetry of Hugo Ball in 1977. The most surreal songs of Bob Dylan were released – and not on any indy label – some 36 years ago. Eminem crams in more social observation into any given quatrain than some Pulitzer poets have managed in their entire careers. Ditto songwriters like Townes Van Zandt or Dave Carter, to pick on a completely different musical genre, or groups like Public Enemy & NWA. And Van Zandt & Carter are both dead, and those rap groups already consigned to the remainder bins of history. Or consider, for that matter, Prince, another golden oldie who managed a career without the benefit of a word for a name for several years. The most popular motion picture of the past two years had substantial portions of dialog spoken (with subtitles) in Elvish. To pick another medium altogether, television, the audience coming to this reading will have had everything from the close attention to the spoken that is Buffy, to the narrative ambiguities – including the backwards speaking dwarf – of Twin Peaks to the multiple layers of Max Headroom, all in the range of recent references as they gather to hear somebody read a poem. This is in 2003, 172 years after the first of Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems. Over a century after Rimbaud & Lautréamont. Forty-seven years after Allen Ginsberg published Howl, a book so obscure that it made him a millionaire. All of the above, up to & including the Vampire Slayer, require at least as much sophistication in communication skills on the part of their various audiences as the poem submitted by Noah Eli Gordon. And when we consider the number & kinds of discourses that occur simultaneously on a single screen of CNN’s Headline News channel – let alone consider the signage visible at any instant as we walk or drive down any commercial street in America – we see that it is the surface of the univocal poem [...] that is the deviant experience. Whether or not we approve or disapprove is entirely another matter – but the one-dimensional surface profoundly is the exception to our experience of language, not the rule."

Sorry to offload so much text from other sites, but both Tesh and Silliman put their case so much better than I might have been able to in rehashing it. In essence, both writers are expressing a sense of boredom with the well-made poem, with neat conclusions and easily definable surfaces; both are pressing the case for 'multivocality' as the default experience of language in the everyday and, by extension, as the ideal mode in which to produce poetry. One would have thought that this was old hat, considering that modernism exploded onto the scene some time ago, and has been thoroughly declawed over the decades ever since. But this is not the case, and in a critical environment where Erica Wagner can declare Philip Larkin to be England's most important postwar writer and not be laughed all the way to the moon, these debates between ease and difficulty are all the more pressing [1]. If one expects these arguments from Silliman - he has, after all, got his finger on the pulse of modern poetry in a way that many of us simply don't have the knowledge for, and besides, his aesthetic affiliations are certainly of the multivocal stripe - it is heartening to hear them emanating in nascent form from a young poet-critic. Find a copy of Zukofsky's A as soon as possible, Emily: it'll knock the univocalists clean out your ears.

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[1] Jorie Graham, at a recent reading at Warwick University, noted the essential problem in the use of the term 'difficult' to desribe poetry, as it tended to put people off, and open up the critical field for popularisers like Billy Collins to fill the gap, and decalre simplicity 'in', at the expense of more complicated writers. (Neil Astley's is effectively fulfilling Collins's role in a British context.) Graham favoured 'complexity', as it is much less of a loaded term: 'difficulty' when applied to artistic productions is only ever two dainty semantic steps away from 'elitism', and no one likes elitism, do they? So, following Graham, 'difficulty' is hereby banned from Gists and Piths for good, unless the context calls for it - for example, 'I have difficulty reading Ian McEwan, because his books are awful', is acceptable; 'J H Prynne is a difficult poet' is not.