Palette and Page: form and OuLiPo

George Ttoouli ruminating like a ruminant on issues of poetic form...

I had an interesting argument with someone recently (Jonathan Skinner in fact, and I don't know whyI need to be reticent about his name, he's a man of vast intelligence), that led me to thinking whether form is different to constraint, or that shape is different to constraints. This in response to a discussion of Oulipian procedural constraints as different to traditional ideas of poetic form. I see these elements as contigently dependent, or overlapping, in the manner of a Venn diagram, to the point that those brief elements you might argue lie outside of the nearly-equalised sets of the two terms, in the manner of two spotlights not quite perfectly overlaid, could easily be accommodated into equalisation through a little bit of thinking.

So, while the procedural constraints of Georges Perec's La Disparation might not appear to be a 'shaping' factor, or formal rule, it does restrict the words he may use in the way that, say, asserting the length of a poem called a 'sonnet' can. If a sonnet is a rule that starts by cutting out of the morass of blank page a small edifice, the size of a room of one hundred and forty syllables, or seventy stresses, or ten by fourteen, and cetera, a lipogrammatic rule begins by placing its restrictions on the palette with which the poet can build, resulting in a poem of any size or shape, formally speaking.

The argument might then be a distinction between the 'form' of a poem as being that which takes shape on the page; and the 'constraints' of language whereby the means for making those shapes are curtailed. However, to complicate this, words come with little rule packages for how they can be deployed on the page: they are verbs, they are nouns, they are articles definite and indefinite. "Slowly accommodation the the and" makes bugger all communicative sense, non? However, it is still acceptable in a certain poem (is 'earned by context') if we choose to bend the rules, or break them. That's a given, and part of the point: form earns content, gives content context.

If we constrain the language palette, therefore, creepy little feelers spread out into our capacity to shape language on the page: with the lipogrammatic removal of the letter 'e', we lose the definite article; and syntax gallops in wyrd unfixity, an unabling form aggrandisingly visual in all outbursts. Syntax is the order of language in relation to communication units. Is syntax a constraint, or a form, or the hazy space whereby these two mentally distinct concepts conjugate? (I defy you to find a definition of syntax that doesn't include either the word 'form', or 'rule', or both, and which isn't rubbish.)

If we think of form as a translation of a set of rules into a repeatable abstraction (not as difficult as it sounds*) and that constraints can only be communicated in the same way, or even only refer to the individual rules when the word is taken at face value, then one can start to ask, 'What are the constraints of a sonnet?' If one tries to do the same with procedural poetics - 'What are the constraints of the lipogram?'- a distinction does emerge, of sorts. Constraints begin to fall into the category of rules alone, rather than the wider form; hence constraints are a subset of form. And lipograms begin to manifest more specifically as a type of form, rather than a constraint.

This still leaves a blank in the map where the idea of 'procedurality' lies. Joseph Conte, in Unending Design, suggests certain poetic forms gravitate towards categories of procedural and serial, infinite and finite, predetermined and free. Procedurality is therefore a loose grouping of approaches to form, or forms themselves, as demonstrated by specific poems, where the constraints are set in advance (referring to palette, not shape on the page) of writing. Oulipian forms, such as the beautiful-inlaw and outlaw, demonstrates this as a crossover problem also. Harry Mathews' 'Husserl's Curse' is also a sestina; is this the blending of two distinct practices of rule-making, the one being the palette, the other the page space? Or is it that the two can now go hand in hand, since traditional form has been under sustained testing, attack and experimentation for long enough that we no longer need to see a full distinction?

I sound a little more definite in parts of this than I intended, so hope this won't put off any responses.

* E.g. what is the form of a chair? A floor to arse interface, comprising a construct to provide distance from the floor (legs), a horizontal surface to support the arse (seat) and a vertical surface to support the back (back). Remove the back and you have the abstract form of a stool. Add wheels and a spinning column thing and you get a swivel chair. With inclusion of materials, design aesthetics and so on, you get a specific, (non-Platonic, although arguably the ideal of 'chair' is a non-existence objective) manufacturable chair. The 'form' is translateable into set of written instructions so that another chair may be constructed by someone else. I see this as no different to explaining what a sonnet is, or what a lipogram is.

'lyric urgency' vs. 'stratified histories of place' (Skoulding)

George Ttoouli on Keats vs. Critchley / mystery vs. expression

A new web project by Sophie Mayer kicks off in September, which you'll have to wait for. More details when it launches, but I was skimming through the draft interviews and was struck by a number of poets who claimed to have started writing because of reading Keats – myself included. This got me thinking about inspiration and background. For many it's the poets we encounter in school, often the familiar, white, male curriculum names like Keats and Wordsworth, which decide if we'll chime or not with the wider world of poetry. And of that familiar library, Keats stands out when you're young and impressionable.

Something Zoe Skoulding says in her editorial to the latest Poetry Wales: “Perhaps there are certain kinds of poems that are more easily written in youth, if lyric urgency is considered the ultimate value of the poem. However, age offers something else... a nuanced identification with the stratified histories of place.” Keats has that lyric urgency in abundance, a young poet who speaks to young poetry readers. He chimes, he captures youthful activity, even while his technical skill remains immature at times (though highly advanced for his age, but noticeable more in poems peripheral to his canonised odes and narratives) and his leaping at emotion is often uncomplicated by experience, still fixated on the passions and disillusionments of coming of age.

This led me briefly into wondering about the problems inherent in poets who aren't culturally rooted in British Romanticism, but are curricularised by a British Council-driven literary mould. My recent tastes stem from immersion in more experimental writing, kickstarted by university library shelves, which were stocked by the staunch, brilliant, alternatively-bespectacled perspective of Peter Larkin. (Names like Geoffrey Hill, John James, JH Prynne; Frances Horovitz, Marianne Moore and Lyn Hejinian, which I read randomly, with no sense of connections, movements, history. The gaps in my grasp of aesthetic grouping, in literary inheritance, are still vast.)

A sidenote emerges from this. The curriculum didn't teach me about poetry that is self-conscious about its processes, its intentions, that states within it an aesthetic manifesto. Take Olson's declaration of 'SPACE' in Call Me Ishmael, or (another recent joy to read) Emily Critchley's broadside on his masculine opening of the field (in the Spring 2012 issue of Poetry Wales), 'Some Curious Thing II': “& the extent to which SPACE is constructed in gendered terms is an interesting question / it is always an interesting question to write back the projection of body or SPACE or / urban creatures, who look suddenly cute snuffling round in the trash”. Critchley's subject is, in part, social organisation and social thought, but primarily you get a sense of the theory of space, of poetics, of a particular brand of feminism. The poem doesn't just enact space in its extravagantly long lines, its almost-prose, but discusses that formal tradition of projectivism and gender in theoretical terms. In other words, it 'nuances' itself with a sense of historical positioning, to return to Skoulding's phrase again, with an exposition of source. It joins the river and doesn't pretend it was born a fully formed Sealife Centre. (I've also started watching dolphin documentary The Cove, which is astonishing, upsetting, and points to the political problems in hiding one's roots/sources.)

Keats goes for the jugular of the emotion, not exposing, perhaps not aware of, the concepts feeding his poem. The narrative and imagery carry the meaning; the source of these things is glossed, not the point of the poetry. But the prosody works within formal, conservative lines to convey very subtle enforcements of content; and the content is patriarchal, lusty, laden with the kind of stock fantasies that frankly, a male poet writing today ought to question. (I know, a gross oversimplification, but up to a point very few British canonised poets methodically counter the pentametric conservative social values that make me think of women in corsets and white men killing natives on a tennis lawn).

By contrast, Critchley and Olson, in these particular pieces I've mentioned, work from a structural challenge to the norms of poetic tradition, using the essay form, prosaic lines, a splattergun of page space (yes, that's a technical term), while also incorporating a discussion of their respective counter-approaches as an additive to traditional ideas of a poem's subject. The world is not seen or represented directly, in either series; instead, the camera's focus is on the interaction between ideas about the world and the point where the physical world meets those ideas. (And while Olson still hasn't shuck off that patriarchal stuff, he at least invites a degree of interrogation of his SPACES and now this discussion sounds like it's heading towards latex gloves and stripsearches...)

And I said to myself, mid-ponder, No, self-reflexivity seems a little too irritating, too much a metastatic contagion, with an emphasis on the 'static'. Yes the focus has moved one place along to promote understanding about human perspective, but there's the danger of total detachment from the world. Or something like that. I think I need to unpick that a little, because it doesn't mean either Olson's or Critchley's poetry leaves me cold – far from it. But that when it's mishandled, this technique of exposing one's own processes, one's thinking, one's skeleton, is at risk of losing its reference in the actual world.

Then, in the spirit of this kind of poetry, I started asking where this particular argument comes from. It's from reading Keats, isn't it? It's from being moulded by the kind of poetry that isn't interested in its own processes, in exposing its mechanical operations – what's the phrase from architecture? structural expression? – but instead progresses by a kind of mystery, or worse, mysticism, in how the language comes by its emotive and intellectual qualities. The one or the other should be decided by the purpose of the poem.

At this point I'm purely speculating, but isn't the 'mysterious' approach, as against the 'expressed' one of transparency vs. snobbery? Is there a conflicting political demonstration in which of these directions you choose to take your own poetry? Even 'leftist' poetry can have within it an authoritarian control, a sense of wanting to cover its traces - a condescension towards the reader. And sometimes right-leaning poetry works towards justifying its content with questions and an exposition of process, while also carrying a kind of elitist closure. Keats seems decidedly mysterious when compared to Wordsworth's deeper interrogations of process and the self's relation to environment, for example.

Again, a simplification, as I think this is one of the discussions that Simon and I consistently return to, although the conversation tends to sit on the tails of particular poets who do or don't fulfil our preferences, without travelling much distance into the wider picture. Perhaps that would be stating the obvious too much? But this also seems to be a criticism we've had of one poet we've encountered recently, [name deleted, we may get to this in full], who has the strength of a massive marketing machine behind them, but little discussion of where their poetics comes from. But for now I'll stop where I am and see if anyone has ideas for ways to take this further - reading, ideas, examples, etc.

Is This a Penis?

George Ttoouli responds to some letters to the Editors.

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Dear Editors,

I write knowing that both of you are fans of Baroness. I have a query regarding the cover image of The Blue Album.

Some months after buying it, my eight year old daughter happened to be playing with the CD cases in the living room and suddenly shouted out, “It’s a willy!” Obviously I scolded her and have written to her primary school teacher to find out where she learned such language.

However, on returning to the image on the cover, I suddenly noticed for the first time – and to my great horror – that the breaking egg looks distinctly phallic! While breasts are a perfectly natural thing to display to children (I regularly used to breastfeed in public places and see no problem at all with it), genitalia are otherwise something I feel should very much be protected from the gaze of children, or anyone for that matter. 'Packages' should be delivered from pants to pyjamas, without being unwrapped.

Yet still, I feel the most troubling aspect of this is how I failed to notice the egg wasn’t an egg. Or was it? Is the egg an egg? Or is this a penis? This strikes me as a distinctly poetic problem that you may be able to help with.

I can’t have my daughter developing some kind of Freudian complex which manifests every time I serve her a fried breakfast. It’s bad enough with my husband.

Yours,

Mother Metaphor




Dear MM,

First of all, HAHAHAHAHA! Did it really take you that long to work out there was cock on the cover? Next you’ll tell me you missed the vagina!

Talking seriously now, this is a wonderfully deep question you’re asking. At the heart of the question, ‘Is this a penis?’ is the question, ‘What is a metaphor?’ Beyond that, ‘How do we understand the world through language?’

The question of whether the egg ‘is’ a penis or not is exactly the conundrum posed by every metaphor in associating two distinct objects and, arguably, every attempt to represent the world in artistic, or even non-artistic terms. For example, when you say ‘package’ I take it to mean genitalia. More than that, it reveals something of your understanding about the world: you are prudish about talking about cocks and cunts.

Metaphor therefore becomes a revelation of the observer’s state of mind. This is all about context, of course. So we must look at the context of The Blue Album in order to understand if it is a penis or not.

Baroness are working on what appears to be a series of albums. The Editors have occasionally debated the context for the series. My own feeling is that it is a quadrilogy based on the four elements: Red for fire, Blue for water, with following albums being Brown and possibly White for air. However, my co-editor’s theory suggests that traces of the next album can be seen in the latest album’s cover art – elements of blue in the Red cover and yellow in the Blue, suggest the next album will be yellow.

What is clear is that the first two albums are elementally connected, so there are liquid symbols throughout The Blue Album’s art, alongside pagan fertility symbolism. The egg is a distinctly female symbol, yet appearing in the shape of a phallus blurs gender boundaries. What we have is an almost archaeological sense of liquidity, in which boundaries not only between concepts, but between physical things, people and animals, people and people, people and objects, are fluid.

By describing an egg as a phallus, John Baizley is making a unique association that ties in with his philosophy, the philosophy of the music. Rock, folk, bluegrass, are some of the fluid influences operating on the music. Similarly, there is fluidity in the ideology of the content.

The metaphor of egg and phallus evokes a Bataillean notion of eroticism and sexuality, which doesn’t necessarily know where it’s going until it’s arrived. In other words, at this level of art, first one comes up with a fresh association, secondly one asks oneself if it says something valid, if it ‘works’ within the context of the project. There is a mystery to the metaphor that demands self-exploration as much as interrogation of the object, to determine whether it rewards the viewer.

In other words, the answer to the question is one you must decide for yourself. I reiterate your question back at you: “Is this a penis?” Is it? Well?

On a side note, your separation of breasts from other bits is a decidedly inconsistent approach, showing a naively developed understanding of social mores. Furthermore, your use of “packages” as a metaphor for genitalia is both unoriginal and very simplistically positioned in the context of your letter. This could be considered an example of clarity in communication, but also shit as poetry. To put this in poetic terms: a mother wunwilling to tongue her child’s wounds would offer that same child's heart in human sacrifice, even though the gods have not demanded it.

Our condolences to your daughter,

The Editors.

Aggressive Interview #2: Carrie Etter, Poet, Lecturer

I’d like to know why you bothered with Yet despite the two real books you have lined up with Seren and Shearsman. Aren’t pamphlets just an ugly way of saying, “This poetry isn’t worth backing with real money and you’re probably wasting your time reading it”?

Ugly? Have you seen Yet?

Seriously, I think that a pamphlet can prove useful in a number of respects. Emerging poets can learn about editing and sequencing before they approach a publisher with a book-length manuscript, and using the pamphlet as a stepping stone also means such poets will take more time to develop their first books. For poets in between books, it may allow them to publish an independent sequence or work-in-progress, generating interest in the new work and potentially the next book.

With Yet, it had been ten years since I brought out a pamphlet (Subterfuge for the Unrequitable, Potes & Poets, 1998), and my experimental work had evolved significantly in that time. I wanted to cull the best of the work (that would cohere) since Subterfuge, both to show UK readers a significant selection (Subterfuge appearing only in the US) and take a look at the trajectory for myself. I’ve had an unexpected benefit in that I have a much stronger sense of the direction I want Divining for Starters to take, as it will include poems from both pamphlets as well as other work. That is to say, I think Divining for Starters will be a stronger book on account of Yet.

You talk about Yet as the distillation of ten years’ work. TS Eliot was equally notorious in producing very slowly, emphasising quality over quantity. The book industry has clearly taken a stance against poetry’s tendency towards low output, high costs, low sales. How do you feel about poets who do manage to get a book out a year?

I tend to be dubious about the quality of poetry that is produced by a book a year schedule, but I don’t rule out the possibility of its greatness, as I realise particular circumstances in one’s life can give rise to intense creativity without losing quality. This works both ways, of course. I suppose the fact that I worked from the age of fifteen and throughout my time at university has hampered my output. I fantasise about a sabbatical.

You’re an American-born poet living in England. I’m taking for granted that this invalidates your opinion about either country: you lack a history in one and up-to-date immersion in the other. So what do you write about that’s worth reading, given you can’t write about these issues?

While I was not brought up in the UK, I came here partly because I was completing a PhD in Victorian literature and criminology; specifically, my thesis was titled Class, Gender and the Making of the Criminological Subject in Mid-Victorian Fiction. This required a general study of criminology from its origins late in the 19th century through to the present and led me to learn about various historical developments, etc. along the way. Of course such a history is incomplete, but I think that is true for everyone; knowledge and experience of a country are always partial because of one’s situation.

I also stay up to date with the States by remaining in close contact with family and friends and visiting 2-3 times a year. My attendance at the Associated Writing Programs conference two out of the last three years has been helpful especially in my knowledge of what’s happening in contemporary poetry.

But I tell you this simply as a matter of course, not because I think the above validates what I have to say. I don’t think of my national identity as the reason I have anything to say worth reading; it might give me some additional subject matter, but so could any number of experiences.

What do I write about that’s worth reading? I’m not sure that’s for me to decide. As to my forthcoming books, The Tethers is interested in the kinds of bonds we form with one another, in time; Divining for Starters utilises, to use Lyn Hejinian’s phrase, “a poetics of consciousness” to explore those issues I often find more effectively approached in a nonlinear form, e.g. the erotic, politics, and selfhood.

Political poetry is a joke in the UK, the domain of peace-protest marches; yours included. Discuss.

I strongly believe that it is part of my work as a poet to address socio-political issues and to do so to the best of my ability. Mind, I say my work – it is a matter for each individual poet to decide for him/herself. Recently, on a panel on Yeats’ influence, Ian Duhig remarked that Yeats had addressed all the matters of life, and to do so necessarily meant he wrote about politics.

My commitment to political poetry also includes attempts to give it a larger audience than I generally seek for my other writing. For all of my readings from Yet, I open with ‘The Occupation of Iraq’; this introduces listeners to my style as well as the political bearing of some of my poetry. I also try to republish political poems originally published in the UK in US magazines, find publication in journals that do not cater only to other poets, etc.

How would you feel if one of the readers of Yet thinks it’s OK to wage war in the Middle East after they’ve read your poem on the subject?

Thinking of the political poetry I’ve written to date, I can’t imagine that any of it would produce such a response, as the poems tend to suggest an individual’s responses to specific events rather than a more general critique or call to arms. If such a reader responded that way, I would suppose that that idea or thought was there before s/he read my work. At the same time, I realise that all of us are only partially sighted and remain open to reconsidering such a possibility.

How welcome do you feel in the UK and the US, as a poet, an academic, a woman, and a politically-vocal person? What do you think you should do about this, if anything?

Thank you for referring to me as politically vocal. It pleases me that someone else regards me thus.

I have a strong sense of ethics, and I feel it is important for me to be true to them. I can’t separate the academic from the poet (partly because I don’t regard academic as a necessarily bad attribute), the woman from the politically-vocal, and realise that that combination is regarded somewhat more negatively in the UK; but that is also why I tend to feel I can do more in the UK to broaden people’s sense of what poetry and who poets can be. That excites me.


Carrie Etter is a Lecturer in Creative Studies at Bath Spa University. Her pamphlet Yet was published last year by Leafe Press and her first full length collection, The Tethers, will be published in July by Seren Books. She also has a second full collection, Divining for Starters, due in 2010 from Shearsman Books.

You can read Carrie's blog here.

Andrew Bailey - Beyond the Horizon: Great Trustworthy Doubts

[Andrew Bailey sent me this wonderful response to an essay I wrote for Horizon Review, originally published here.]

It was a pleasure to read your piece in Horizon, George, especially with some underlinings for applause, such as "Leavis crossed with Hovis" and "for 'oak' read 'jacaranda'". But I don't find myself agreeing with an undercurrent I found in it; stop me, of course, if I'm misunderstanding, but aren't you asking for one Great Trustworthy Voice to hand down opinion on what's worth reading? Or, rather, "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."

Partly I want to tease - are you volunteering? - and partly I want to demur, not least in comparison with the wine industry where there's an argument that all the interesting old-world wines are being pushed out by Robert Parker's taste buds - he who, according to the Guardian, "can make or break a French vineyard" - in favour of the round, fruity, easy-drinkers he prefers. One critic, one taste, one type of production grows to be too prevalent and the pleasure of exploration is lost.

You've dealt with that, of course - your "casual readers" are those without the time and interest to dedicate to exploration, presumably wanting a guaranteed hit of the good stuff. On the part of the committed readers, there's a failure "to promote quality use of language" which lets the casuals down, so that they're faced with a wall of poetry - or a shelf or two, depending on the shop - and don't know where to start. A Great Trustworthy Voice, henceforth GTV, would be able to tell them what to start with. Am I misrepresenting? If not, isn't this precisely what the Poetry Book Society aims to do? Admittedly, I left in horror one year at the thought that they thought the book they had sent me was the best of the quarter, but that's a failure of execution, not intention.

That's a thing that does the decisions for you, though, and I think you're after informing the decisions that people make themselves. Doesn't a single GTV work against that?

There's also a measure of obedience here that I think bears looking at. There was a music reviewer on Teletext I used to love purely because his taste was so opposed to my own; I knew, from having followed his recommendations in the past, how to read them. I don't think I'm terribly special in that; someone who loves romantic comedies probably reads Mark Kermode differently from the way a zombie fan does. So "readers must also decide which of the many struggling critics put forward by mass and local media they should trust". I think they'd cope.

It's not a lack of criticism I see; not even a lack of good criticism. Nor the lack of it being bound to a moral yardstick. I sometimes see people unprepared to give time to a slow art, but it's a powerful critic who can change a reading style, rather than draw out a book's good points. It might be possible, but I don't think it's Eliot who's the model so much as David Attenborough, or maybe Maggie Philbin. You need the energy from somewhere to give the thing enough time to become enjoyable - as with smoking, with ballroom dancing, with coffee - and trying to do it by creating more palatable poetry is just the alcopop approach.

Let's have a Private Life of Poetry; not Daisy Goodwin's little acted-out self-help dramas, not the tragic life story to which poems are handy sources of illustrative quotes, but people who can transmit their enthusiasm as well as - maybe even before - their knowledge. Realising the joys of food may lead you to recognise the flavours of cumin and oregano, may help you decide which kinds of restaurants you want to go to, spot the difference between an acquired taste and a nasty one - but joy first.

It's the enthusiasm of people - friends, teachers, other poets and, yes, critics - that has given me the urge to pursue things I didn't initially enjoy, to drive me past being a casual reader, and that's almost always been about shaping ways to like, not shaping a list of things to try to like.

Best wishes, as ever -

Andrew

Statements of Intent (3) - Gloria Dawson: "White Asparagus in Vladivostok"

What a lot of people use language for seems to me absurd. There are two things to do with this absurdity - joy in it, or try to transcend it. I oscillate (and oscillation is often a good way to describe what I am doing and being) between the two. I have written for a long time without much knowing what I was doing (I am typing this in the dark, nearly). Poets who have rocked my world: Clare, Stevens, Grahams Jorie and W.S. John Kinsella. One can't make totems out of any of them and I try to avoid worship. Everything is a potential idol - and one should allow a transient gaze to settle occasionally.

A poet is someone with a bad sense of timing.

Statements of Intent (2) - Rupert Loydell: "Excerpts from Two Interviews"

Most of my written work is - much like many other poets' writing - a response to the world around me; a kind of ongoing diary of experience, reading and observation. This is catalysed and changed by the processes I use to try and make the language playful, interesting and new. I'm personally bored by poems that tell stories and have an epiphanic punchline at the end. I like poems that bemuse, confuse, befuddle and delight.

I want poems that ask more questions than offer answers, poets who facilitate a way through unreason and uncertainty, disbelief and doubt. I'm not alone: poet/critic Charles Bernstein, in his book My Way [University of Chicago, 1999], suggests that 'Poetry is turbulent thought, at least that's what I want from it. It leaves things unsettled, unresolved - leaves you knowing less than you did when you started.'

In this [my] kind of poetry themes emerge, tentatively appear and disappear. I try to keep the vocabulary everyday and readable, but distort syntax and the linear. Make surprises, jumps, leaps of imagination. What I read, see and engage with around me gets - sometimes directly - collaged into poems; so it's very personal. It's my voice because I made it. It isn't as simple as "cut-up", as the sorts of poems I once-upon-a-time wrote usually get worked into the poems of the sort I now write.

I remain more interested in language as a medium and what one can do with it now perhaps more than "saying something". The reader brings meaning to the poem as much as the author; they always have, now its made more explicit/implicit in the work.

*

For the last few years my main way of writing has been to assemble phrases into a poem. These phrases come from my own notebooks, from books I am reading at the time [sometimes grabbed almost at random; at other times phrases I've jotted down whilst reading], from songs and CD covers, from newspapers and magazines, from my head.... One thing I don't do is take lines from other people's poems - that's just a personal choice. I somehow synthesize this assemblage of words and phrases into a poem around the theme, or image, I started with. I type them up fairly early on, and then edit them every 2 or 3 days, usually for at least 3 months. When they haven't been changed for a fortnight or so, I will regard a work as finished. It will then be submitted to a magazine, and a copy put in my current poetry file and in my folder for readings.

I tend to do a lot of thinking in my head around a subject. I listen to a lot of different sorts of music, especially improvised, contemporary jazz and classical, and out-rock, and I think musical composition [in a loose sense; I don't read music] has affected my use of form. I am also a bookworm and read a lot of poetics and visual arts theory, postmodern theology along with fiction and poetry. All this somehow "shakes down" into my poetry, as does what I see around me.

I don't think anyone will get anything more or extra out of my poetry by knowing how it is written. I'm not, in the end, a great one for contextualisation: here is the poem, on the page; here is the painting, on the gallery wall; here is song, on the CD [or played live]. What you see is what you get.

© Rupert Loydell

Statements of Intent (1) - Catherine Hales: "A Note on 'Poetics'"

I glean, I garner, I gather, I hoard,– scraps of sentences, scraps of other texts, things heard on the radio or tv or overheard in the street , the u-bahn... bits & pieces, and at some point I play around with the bits & pieces and they coalesce into a poem. But I like to keep things moving, I try to get the poem to hit the ground running and keep running and take off again at the end: flux and continuum. so when I say coalesce, I don't mean becoming fixed, but just becoming, always becoming, being in flux, there just long enough to be perceived or guessed at and then it's off again somewhere else. I don't necessarily write poems 'about', since messages are for tracts; meaning is contingent and a matter of negotiation with the reader as an equal partner in the process. 'Meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation and experience. (Christine Gledhill).

So a poem is also play – put these things together and see what happens. It's play as in theatre, mime, pretend; as in play on words; as in the play of light on a clear stream; as in game theory; as in mucking about in the mudpit and getting filthy. Form is part of the play, an arbitrary choice as to how to arrange the words on the page, possibly even giving some kind of order to the coalescing chaos, imitating, ironising or mocking conventional notions of form. This does not contradict the notion of flux. It is rather part of the 'meaning'.

Or an apposite quote from John Ashbery I just found on Ron Silliman's blog: "I would not put a statement in a poem. I feel that poetry must reflect on already existing statements...Poetry does not have a subject matter, because it is the subject matter. We are the subject matter of poetry, not vice versa...When statements appear in poetry they are merely a part of the combined refractions of everything else."

Or none of the above.

Catherine Hales, May 2008

Simon Turner - Close Encounters (1) - Lee Harwood, 'Gorgeous - yet another Brighton poem'

Lee Harwood has become a definite fixture in the pantheon of poetry gods who've influenced the way my work has developed over the years, but my discovery of his work was, in a lot of ways, a stroke of good luck. His poetry had been recommended to me by my uncle, who had seen him read a couple of times. Harwood's name, however, was completely unknown to me, though this was the first year of my undergraduate degree and, frankly, I knew nothing. Still don't. But on a whim, I looked for a copy of his collection of the time, Morning Light, in the University of Warwick bookshop and found one [1]. I looked through the list of previous publications at the back: no titles I knew, and no presses either. Obviously I was familiar with the Penguin Modern Poetry series, and had heard of John Ashbery, who was in the same volume as Harwood, but who was this Tom Raworth fellow who made up the trinity? Who ran Pig Press, and why hadn't I ever seen any of their books at the local Waterstone's? Who was Tristan Tzara, and why was Harwood so keen on translating him?

All of these questions would, in the fullness of time, be answered, up to a point, but what mattered right now was the fact that Harwood's work felt like it had dropped out of an alternative universe - which, in a way, it had. I knew nothing at this stage about the aftershock of the so-called Poetry Wars of the 1970s, nor about the internicine struggle between mainstream and experimental poetics that underpinned much of the aesthetic debate about poetry in the post-war years. Nor was I familiar with the important trends in American poetry that had so influenced Harwood's own approach: I loved Williams, liked some Pound, had 'issues' with Eliot, blah de blah de blah, but hadn't yet fallen in love with the Black Mountaineers, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry seemed as alien a landscape as the moons of Jupiter, frankly. Jack Spicer could have been a radio DJ for all I knew, and James Schuyler a copy editor toiling in obscurity for some local interest rag in one of the red states.

What this is all a prelude to is the purity of my reading of Harwood at that time, unhampered by prejudice, not tied down by history and socio-political affiliation. The poems just were, but I knew they were something special; they sang in a way that a lot of contemporary poetry didn't at that time - or, rather, the contemporary poetry I had either found in bookshops, or studied in class. What was apparent first and foremost was Harwood's clarity: the language was so simple, so unadorned, as too seem entirely without artifice, though, as I've come to realise, it's extremely hard to write simply and to write well at the same time [2]. Yet it was also apparent that this style had been worked at, that the phrasing, simple as it seemed, was opening up entire worlds in the space of a few words. Suggesting enormity, rather than showing it.

My favourite poem in the collection at the time - it remains one of my favourites by Harwood to this day - was 'Gorgeous - yet another Brighton poem'. In some ways, everything I've written since has been an effort, however oblique, to rewrite that one poem. I've never quite recovered from it. The title alone is worth the price of entry: there's a wonderful deadpan humour to it, entirely at odds with what usually passes for 'humorous' verse. Indeed, that's one thing that makes Harwood's poetry special - his refusal to differentiate between registers, his shifts in tone from the comic or the whimsical, to the darker shades which have always been present in his work.

From the title, let's move - with tubthumping obviousness - to the first line: 'The summer's here.' Which is about as plain and unadorned as it's possible to get. Yet it also does everything a first line needs to, whilst jettisoning the gubbins that a great many poets would feel the need to include. The first stanza goes on:

Down to the beach
to swim and lounge and swim again.
Gorgeous bodies young and old.
Me too. Just gorgeous. Just feeling good
and happy and so at ease in the world.

The trick here, of course, is that Harwood gives the impression of speaking just to the reader: he makes himself an active presence in the poem, whilst at the same time evading an unproblematic use of the lyric 'I'. That is to say that the 'I' is not assumed, but is physically inserted - 'Me too' - into the fabric of the poem, quietly drawing attention to the gap between author and text. I'd call it 'postmodern', but that would give the impression that the poem is all intellectual play of surfaces and depthless reification of the commodified body in a post-industrial epoch, which it isn't. Indeed, what stands out is the sensual quality of the poem, the physical impact of its subtly adjectival method. The sea is 'silky', the air 'soft and warm, / like fur brushing my body'. In some regards, the poem is a collaborative effort between author and reader (or text and reader, more correctly). The poem, rather than simply forcing an impression or narrative upon the reader, actually opens events up for a second degree of experience. The reader becomes a part of the poem not in any passive way, but in such a manner that they are engaged physically with the mechanics of the text. We ask questions: in what way is the sea 'silky'? What is the exact experience of soft, warm air, and how does that relate to the physical sensation of being brushed by fur? Slowly, imperceptibly, the poem enacts a sensual narrative upon the body.

Immediately, though, the sensation of being suspended in the poem - appropriately, given the central motif of the ocean - Harwood pulls the rug out from under our feet by including a dictionary definition of 'gorgeous':

The dictionary says
"gorgeous - adorned with rich and brilliant colours,
sumptuously splendid, showy, magnificent, dazzling."

This succeeds in drawing attention to the constructed nature of the text, rendering all that has gone before a kind of illusion. One might be reminded of the word glamour, which has a similarly duplicitous nature, redolent of both dazzling beauty and deceit. Harwood seems unsure, almost, of the sensual effects of his poem; in some regards, we might read the dictionary definition as preceeding the poem, and the 'showy, magnifient, dazzling' lines which Harwood has achieved as being a response. The poem, Harwood reminds us, lest we fall foul of a too-easy reading, always begins in words, and an untroubled relationship between word and world can never, finally, be achieved.

====

[1] This is remarkable, as his books weren't - aren't - easy to come by: Harwood's long been a staple of small independent presses, whose books simply don't get the same degree of distribution and promotion as the big hitters - Faber, Cape, Picador. A shame, as the work being done by the small press world deserves far better recognition than it is currently given.

[2] As a test, try writing like Harwood, or Raymond Carver. It's tough: on the one hand, there's the constant difficulty of making sure your studiedly 'simple' phrasing isn't simply flat and uninspired; on the other, there's the need to constantly check one's tendencies towards the baroque, towards purple euphoria. What results is usually unspeakable.

Simon Turner - Marginal Notes (3)

The only time where language has failed me completely was when my grandfather died, and I was writing – or attempting to write – a letter to my grandmother, telling her how sorry I was, how much I would miss him. No words seemed appropriate to the emotions I wanted to express, and I spent a solid hour in the library staring at a blank page before writing a few terse sentences, no doubt identical to what people are always reduced to when faced with the blunt facts of death: I’m so sorry, I will miss him so much.

*

I wrote the first poem I was ever truly satisfied with at that same desk, or one very like it, but certainly on the same floor of the university library. I cannot remember now what the poem was about, though I can recall that one of the images – hands compared to starfish clinging to a rock (was that the exact phrasing?) – was stolen from the Odyssey, which I was studying at the time. I no longer have a copy of the poem, and I suspect if I were to read it now, at such a distance from the originating emotions that went into its production, I would be embarrassed at its gaucheness, its lack of form or rigour. At the time, however, it meant a lot to me: I spent three uninterrupted days writing that poem, skipping meals and lectures, and only stopped when I was sure it was absolutely right.

*

At college, I had the opportunity to go on a writing weekend in Aberystwyth. I very nearly missed out on this chance, as I had put my name down late in the term, and was only on the reserve list, but luckily someone dropped out and I weaselled my way in. Aberystwyth, I remember, was hilly, or, no, it was built partially on a hill. I remember, too, taking a trip along the coast by rail with all the other students on the course to a desolate strip of shingle beach. Very Welsh: mist over everything, and the waves galumphing up the shore. I did get a couple of poems out of it, one of them in a loosely mystical mode (shot-through with apocalyptic undercurrents), the other revolving around a protracted – and, I now know, clichéd – comparison between the movements of the tide and sexual desire. I knew nothing about sexual desire, fulfilled or otherwise, but I enjoyed the sound the words made when I wrote them down, and the tutors seemed to like it, so the authenticity of the material was not really an issue to me. Now, however, I can see things differently, more clearly, and I recognise that my ocean-sex poem represented a false start, a bum note. Maybe I should have written a poem about getting drunk in an Aberystwyth pub instead – at least it would have been true – but I’ll make up for my lapse in judgement by writing about it now. I’d never really been drunk before, and found myself saying things I wouldn’t normally say – such as arguing that the legalisation of heroin was preferable, purely from the perspective of medical health, to keeping it classified as illegal – and behaving in ways that were quite out of character. Towards the end of the evening, I stumbled outside for some fresh air, and noticed that the rain falling through the streetlights looked like insects dancing. I tried to tell one of the tutors about this, but they just smiled or laughed, I don’t remember which, thinking I was drunk, which I was, a little, but missing, I think, the essential point of what I was trying to say. I walked back through the rain to the university accommodation where we’d been housed for the weekend, arm in arm with another lad whose name I can’t now remember, singing Queen songs at the top of our lungs.

Simon Turner - Marginal Notes (2)

The proliferation of media has resulted, too, in a proliferation of selves. We leave behind traces - in CCTV, digital photographs, emails, phone calls, comments on the internet - which take on a life independent of our bodies. When I die, the traces I have left behind will live on in a technological half-life, never to be erased. Such a thought is unsettling. When we write a book or compose a symphony, we are making a conscious choice to create an artifact that will, hopefully, outlive us. What is so unsettling about our technological ghosts is their ephemeral nature: we are leaving a monument of our most vacuous selves each time we send an email, every time we update our Facebook page. If we could clone ourselves from the virtual genetic trail of our technological journeys, I doubt that we would recognise the result. We would see a parody, a grotesque exaggeration of all those characteristics we had hoped would be airbrushed out of our obituaries. The proliferation of media does not allow for this rather old fashioned self-censorship: we are writing our obituaries on an almost hourly basis.

*

The self, in Buddhism, is a kind of learned behaviour: it is a matter, chiefly, of differentiation. 'I' is only 'I', that is, because it is not 'you', or it is not 'chair' or 'sky' or 'music'. It is a habit, in short, that we fall into at an early age, when we begin to learn how to distinguish objects and concepts in our immediate environment through the medium of language. Before this, before we take on the role of Adam, the world presents itself as an undifferentiated mass. Naming lends a certain clarity of purpose to the world and its objects. But at the same time, language serves to sever us, to deny us a total connection to the world. We can never know a tree, for example, if we have already named it, because the word 'tree' carries with it a whole universe of associations and embedded significances which are quite distinct from the physical fact of the tree in itself. Likewise, to truly know ourselves, we must do away with the semantic formality of 'I'. It, like 'tree', is simply a name - an arbitrary one at that - and as such an impediment to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. Sometimes I think this is why so many mystics and holy men choose to separate themselves off from the human community: the absence of speech means an absence of language, and the absence of language might well be the first step towards our reconciliation with the total being of the universe.

*

23/10/2007: A full moon tonight: a perfect silver-white disc. In the early evening I watched it make its first appearance, tentatively peeping from behind a chimney across the street, a peachy flush from the last of the sun tainting its colouration. Minutes later it was clear of the houses, more sure of itself now, slowly rolling towards the apex of its orbit. Later that night, walking home after a couple of drinks with friends in the local, I saw it flare from the centre of an absolute darkness, like a perfect unexpected thought.

Simon Turner - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest (response) (response)

Nice comeback. And I think you're perfectly correct that the arguments pertaining to the "nature and meaning of poetry" tend to come to the fore at moments when one is least involved in the process of making, when one is least happy with one's own aesthetic choices. Directionlessness breeds demagoguery, in essence: the creation of a manifesto is so often the need to define a mode of writing - indeed, a mode of being - which does not yet exist. 'Vorticism', of course, never really took off. 'Modernism', a term which evolved organically and stuck, resolutely did take off, and continues sailing through the outer reaches of the galaxy, finding new planets with each curve of its trajectory.

Two addenda: Here you can read an excellent article at Culture Wars by Tom Chivers of pennedinthemargins, which covers much the same ground as my original post, though in a far less melancholic tone.

Below, meanwhile, is a shard of a mock manifesto I made by splicing and rejigging words I'd found from various sources. Make of it what you will:


Manifesto for the False Millennium
page 94

but the Marxists have reduced the poem to a paranoid geometry of suffering. How can we analyse the body in a discontinuous universe? Is the text nothing more than a spoof of nature, a chaos of sexual artifice? Yet still we must persist, recognising the underlying distortions of our readings. It’s time to expel the economy of meaning. Let’s build our writings on emotional concrete, though it seems futile. Let’s freeze lightning and call it a poem. Let the body write the universe as clusters of discontinuous texts. We’ll let the Marxists analyse the underlying “meaning” of our mathematics. Nature persists in its imperfections, its rough instructions. Our ideals reduce the artificial economy to a spoof of its own distortions; chaos is pleasant, after all, like random photographs of paranoid sex. (Observation: the poem, when it contacts us, is like a voice coming through a distorted phone line: rough, sexual, discontinuous.) Switch on the body and the text will write itself. “Meaning” is nothing but the recognition of an underlying emotional futility. There are no ideals in nature. So how might we expel this persistent paranoia? Moreover, how are we to read mathematics in the light of Marxist analysis?

George Ttoouli - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest (response)

Yes, yes, but where does all this posturing come from?

I'm thinking about Lynda Barry's cartoon strip, 'Two Questions', in which her cartoonist persona, hard at the creative act, reminisces fondly about how easy it used to be to create, to enter into the creative flow and enjoy it. And then two questions begin to take over: "Is this good?" and, "Does this suck?"

Barry can't answer these questions. They are unanswerable and eventually she gives up admitting she doesn't know. But this is the point: "To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions, so much is possible. To all the kids who quit drawing... come back!"

Ideology is an adult club. It means: 'We believe we have the answer to what sucks and what's good." The two camps, by deduction, are full of people who have (temporarily?) forgotten the joy of creating poetry. When you've got it, you're doing it, but when you're hung up on the questions of what constitutes good or bad poetry, you're often flailing away in private, producing nothing of merit. The response of many to this is flailing about in public, representing principles of artistic value (not, I stress, 'worth', as the imposition of ideology on creativity is clearly a commodification of the unquantifiable[1]) that are indefensible, but give a sense of community through tribalism.

The hollowness of these values are what probably makes most people despair - readers and the more benign writers of poetry as well. Announcing an artistic manifesto - as the Vorticists prove - is a call to arms as well a way of raising the defenses around a tribe. The media, also, like a good ruck, so they will often latch on, in a minor fashion where poetry is concerned, favouring whichever side is willing to make a bigger fool of themselves in their pages. The extension of this kind of tribalism, through various modes, conceits and also stabilisation within mainstream [2]bastions, is probably worth investigating through the window of anthropological study, as I'm sure it comes in cycles which stack upon the correct traditional Hanoi towers with minor progressive inflections.

But ultimately, "an investigation of the nature and meaning of poetry" when it's based on analysing these self-appointed hierophants (they've been 'vaticinised' like in that godawful opening line of Sean O'Brien's 'Drains' poem), is going to end up biting its own tail because of the inherent emptiness of ideology.

What is interesting is that postmodernist experimentation has managed to parody these ideological movements in order to recapture the childish joy of creativity. For example, the 'Infernokrusher' movement, ("Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction") is a context for generating art, rather than a serious group, just as Oulipo isn't really a movement - it's a process for creating work.

__________________________

[1] See Lewis Hyde's The Gift for more detail (yes, I'm a convert, it's a form of ideology for agnostics), or if you're lazy, the opening lines of Robert Graves' The White Goddess, where he describes poetry as having no yardstick by which it can be measured.

[2] When I say mainstream here, I mean ideologies that are accepted widely within marginalised groups as well - for example, the JH Prynne camp is a form of mainstream within the avant garde, despite having only a handful of acolytes within its boundaries and those being of greatly varying styles.

Simon Turner - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest

I was struck recently by a comment in David Jones' collection of prose writings, Epoch and Artist, in which he poured cold water on critical dismissals of abstract art, arguing - persuasively, I think - that abstraction, which Jones takes to be specifically formal in character, i.e. pertaining to questions of compositional balance, tonal characteristics, and so on, is a central component of all visual art, whether abstract or figurative. To reject abstraction out of hand, Jones goes on, is to mis-read, almost wilfully, the direction of modern artistic developments.

The argument in question is taken from a letter Jones wrote to the Listener in 1950, but the views expressed remain pertinent; and whilst the debates surrounding abstract art, and its figurative opposite number, have largely dissipated in recent years, occasionally resurfacing in the form of public spasms over the Young British Artists, or Turner-prize winners whose work involves sheds or animal dung [1], the same argumentative terms have remained a staple, though translated and mutated, within poetry circles. Mainstream commentators have a tendency to occasionally blow off steam about inevitably unnamed 'postmoderns', who are allegedly clogging the universities with dangerous radical ideas, and running 'subversive' literature classes where the entire Western canon is thrown in the rubbish chute in favour of the collected works of JH Prynne (boo, hiss!), which are, of course, treated with an almost god-like reverence [2]. The 'postmoderns' themselves have a tendency to react with quiet dignity, no doubt in private intercut with deep clefts of scorn, though their own polemical reactions to the mainstream are equally visible, in their aesthetic choices rather than their public statements: their places of publication, their shared discourses, their chosen forms and modes of address, all scream 'marginal' from the rooftops.

All this is merely background, however: the crux of the matter is that both ideological camps - and I do truly believe that ideology is at stake here: this is a ruck about the very nature and meaning of poetry in our current socio-economic epoch - seem to be communicating in entirely different languages. In some regards they are, but they share enough of a vocabulary - often revolving around the notion of the aesthetically and ethically correct (sometimes the two are conjoined) - to mean that communication is a possibility, that there might (just might) come a time when the squabbling could be put aside, and everyone could both write and read in an environment where such sectarian politics did not come in to the equation.

One might - more cynically - suggest that such a rapprochement is an impossibility by virtue of the fact that both parties need the mutual antagonism. The mainstreamers can only defend their position - post-Larkin, semi-interesting - if they can persistently raise the spectre of Olson-chewing, Deleuze-spewing barbarians mustering at the gate. The barbarians themselves, meanwhile, might equally be said to thrive upon a narrative in which they are the oppressed and subjugated indigenous populace of some far away land called Experimental Poetry, stomped upon at every turn by the oak-thewed hegemon of the Mainstream Marines. This seems like the most realistic scenario. First of all, both camps are effectively fighting over a ghost - a general poetry readership - which, if it ever existed (and really, there is no evidence to suggest it ever did) no longer does. Moreover, if we take the proliferation of media into account, it becomes impossible to talk about single ideological blocs in some bipartite power struggle. The mainstream is a chimera that we should, frankly, quit whining about all the bloody time: all the energy wasted ranting about the London poetry scene, and how Picador would never publish John James - would John James want to be published by Picador? - would be far better spent writing more and better poems that would blow the mainstream's own rather pedestrian output out of the water. By the same token, the mainstream's bug-bear - a sinister, Prynne-spearheaded cabal of postmodern eggheads lurking in every English department across the country - appears equally illusory: 'postmodernism' cannot be defined in such monolithic terms that it can be used so frequently as an umbrella noun covering a multitude of sins (or virtues, depending on how we read the situation).

The internet, in particular, has unveiled the sheer ridiculousness of the Sharks vs. Jets mentality that seems to dominate certain sectors of the poetry community, revealing as it does a total aesthetic democracy, where any number of styles of writing, from the gentle and Larkinesque to the balls-to-the-wall radicalism of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics or flarf, can find a suitable home. Who edits Poetry Review in any given year is not the be all and end all of our definition of poetry's health; we have to stop using the centre ground as our yardstick. Aside from anything else, the poetry cake that we're all fighting for a share of is too small for such playground politics anyway. Can't we just stop all the fussin' and the feudin'?

_______________________________________

[1] The Daily Mail, as in so many things, is particularly idiotic on this score. Every year they run an 'alternative' Turner prize, where they give an award to a purveyor of 'proper' art - their definition, of course - which is invariably a byword for landscape paintings or portraiture in a god-awful tradition of semi-literate realism, which examples invariably display the visual flair and compositional imagination of a beige turd.

[2] The terms that the mainstream bulldogs use are strangely similar to the aggressive insult 'tenured radicals' which was hurled at survivors of the counter culture on American campuses during the various 'culture wars' that rocked our cousins on the other side of the big drink in the 1990s.

Simon Turner - Marginal Notes (1)

Borges, in an essay on the Kabbalah in Seven Nights, notes how the concept of the sacred text is dependent upon the divine status of the words themselves. The words are not simply dictated by God (or Allah, or whosoever we might want to name the deity), but is “an attribute of God, like His rage, His pity, or His justice”. Karen Armstrong, expanding upon the theme in an essay accompanying the British Library’s recent exhibition of sacred texts, explains how sacred texts are built around the possibility of the immanence of the deity within the text:

“A hadith qudsi (holy tradition) has God say: ‘When someone recites or reads the Qur’an, that person is, as it were, entering into conversation with Me and I into conversation with him or her’. The Word is still speaking to men and women; the original revelation continues. Whenever a Muslim quotes from the Qur’an or suddenly recalls a Qur’anic phrase, he or she comes directly into the presence of God. When Muslims memorize the Qur’an, it is as though they take the divine Word into their very depths […]”

All poets strive after a similar textual immanence, hoping to recreate the conditions of the originating event – whether that event be an emotional state, a landscape, a vision, or simply an apology taped to a refrigerator door – using words alone, in such a way that they are not simply telling their reader something, but re-enacting it as far as is humanly possible, recognising, of course, the essential futility of the exercise. Borges again, from his short story ‘A Yellow Rose’:

“Then came the revelation. Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise. And he sensed that it existed in its eternity and not in his words, and that we may make mention or allusion of a thing but never express it at all; and that the tall proud tomes that cast a golden penumbra in an angle of the drawing-room were not – as he had dreamed in his vanity – a mirror of the world, but simply one more thing added to the universe.”

*

Self-censorship: How many poems have I edited out of my own life? It’s a strange experience to deliberately – or even unconsciously – erase one of your own poems. It’s the equivalent of cutting off a finger or a toe. This is especially true earlier on, when the poet has not yet learned how to separate themselves from their work to a degree commensurate to long-term survival as a writer. Possibly some writers never reach this point of maturity, which explains why so many of them get so snippy when their writing is criticised. I know I had not learned that lesson in my early twenties, when two friends, independently, tore one of my poems to shreds, critically. Believing they were right, utterly – and still believing it, more so than ever – I destroyed every copy I had of the poem in question. A couple of years later, at a poetry reading, it was mentioned – not to my face, I might add – that one of the poems I read allegedly displayed a contempt for the poor. Worried at this misreading – it had certainly never been my intention to give the impression that I hated the poor – I simply stopped reading it in public, although in this instance I did not take the drastic action of destroying every copy. Maybe I am waiting for a time in my life when I feel contempt for the poor in actuality and not just in my poems, and I can read the piece in public again with a clear conscience.

*

Nietzsche once wrote that to improve one’s style means to improve one’s ideas. He’s absolutely right: language circumscribes what we do, how we think; it defines our capacities as living beings. What we say, moreover, is intimately bound up with how we say it. Think of onomatopoeic words (splash, boom, crack): they are short and sharp, specifically designed to return us to the originating reality behind them – a frog jumping into a pond, a cannon firing from a warship, or a branch breaking in an empty wood. Conversely, words designed to describe or explain philosophical abstractions or states of being which go beyond everyday human experience, tend in themselves to be far more diffuse and elongated, as if the terms had no grounding in factual experience. Transubstantiation, for example, with its portmanteau status and Latinate roots, represents an imposition upon reality. The concept of ‘transubstantiation’ is dependent upon the existence of the word: the signifier and the signified are a unity, equally fictitious, equally alienating.

*

An irony of poetry is that the emotional states or experiences with which it is so often concerned invariably go beyond, or exist below or behind, language’s capacity for logical explication. A poem, at heart, wants to convey pure being, and words get in the way of this project, imposing their own alien meaning, which is never, finally, what the poet had intended to say. The poet, in fact, never intended to say anything. Every time I set pen to paper, I wish instead that I could compose a piece of music, or paint an abstract: anything to escape the tyranny of logic, of signification. Just this morning, standing on the back step with a pair of muddy workman’s gloves on – I’d been taming the overgrown hops shrub by tying it back against the trellis with string – I was watching the birds come to the feeders in the garden. I stood absolutely still, absolutely silent, but the silence and stillness were only external. Inside, a manic lexicon roared into life, naming everything in site like some demented Adam, wandering a world still damp from the egg – finch­, said the lexicon, and blackbird, coal tit, goosegrass, rain-clouds, alleyway. The poem is always interrupting at the moment of its own conception.

Simon Turner - What I like about Luke Kennard

What I like about Luke Kennard is the title of his new collection of poems from Salt, The Harbour Beyond the Movie. It has resonances.

What I like about Luke Kennard is his use of repetition. His poem 'The Murderer' contains the word murderer - and the verb forms 'murder', 'murdered', etc - 47 times, to my count. The effect is simultaneously infuriating and hilarious.

What I like about Luke Kennard is his way with simile and metaphor. I like in particular the final line of 'A Pergola of Exceptional Beauty': 'A tower block collapsed in his chest.'

What I like about Luke Kennard, in fact, is often his final - or 'punch' - lines. There are many examples throughout The Harbour Beyond the Movie which are almost as good as the 'tower block' line, but not quite. They are still, however, very good.

What I like about Luke Kennard is the fact that he doesn't really write like any other poet I can think of, which means I can forgo the execrable reviewerspeak shorthand of 'Like Andre Breton wrestling with Billy Collins dressed in a sumo suit, in a vat full of overdosing crabs', or some such nonsense, leaving me with my critical dignity intact.

What I like about Luke Kennard is, whilst his work does not immediately proffer up ready points of comparison with the contemporary poetry scene - which can only be a plus - it does seem indebted to certain strains within American literary postmodernism. I was reminded throughout of Donald Barthelme, a favourite of mine, particularly in prose pieces such as 'Blue Dog' and 'School'. Elsewhere, 'Photographs of the Notebook' reads like a pitch-perfect parody of the literary game playing of Paul Auster, remarkable for its concision and clarity.

What I like about Luke Kennard is his writing's capacity to make me laugh. But it is a bitter laughter, a cruel laughter. The laughter of a misanthropic book blogger with time to kill on a Saturday afternoon. The rain won't stop; I wrote all this in a red notebook I may or may not have stolen from 'Paul Auster'.

What I like about Luke Kennard is the wolf, his finest creation, who spends the prose sequence 'Wolf in Commerce' flirting with communism, moving through capitalism, and culminating in a shift towards 'plutocracy' ('rule by the coldest and furthest away'). Readers of a left wing bent might want to read this as some kind of 'allegory' for the ten years Tony Blair spent in office. I couldn't possibly comment.

What I like about Luke Kennard is the fact that his work has made me rethink my critical method. I am now of the opinion - or perhaps I was of the opinion before, and his work has clarified that opinion for me - that there is no distinction between the formal choices one makes as an artist or writer, and the formal choices one makes as a reviewer. There have recently been many passionate defences of the art of book reviewing, at a time when many newspapers are culling or radically reducing their review sections. These defences have often gone hand in hand with rather more negative criticism of online reviewing, as though there were some rigid hierarchy of opinion, as though print reviewers were gatekeepers, holding back the tide of some putative barbarian invasion from the Internet. This is clearly phooey. There are good reviewers and bad reviewers in cyberspace, just as there are good and bad reviewers in the 'real' world of print journalism: any other interpretation of the situation is rank stupidity. Certainly poetry reviewing in the mainstream press is growing increasingly poor: the books under review display an almost comical degree of aesthetic homogeneity; and the reviews themselves are written in the most uncritical of terms, very much geared towards the consideration of content, of emotional resonances, an approach which tends to leave aside the far more pressing question of whether such work has any value formally, as made work. What is increasingly apparent is that there is a received mode of mainstream reviewing, just as there is a received mode of mainstream imaginative writing. But where mainstream poetry is often vigorous and eloquent in its self-definition (and self-defence), mainstream reviewing is not so self-aware, and is therefore incapable of examining its own processes. Criticism which is written by the whole person, intellect and instinct in total harmony, I propose, must be aware of its own processes, must be willing to take the same formal risks as the work it is evaluating. An earlier attempt at this same article failed in this, and therefore failed outright: it was full of lazy insight and phony eloquence, replete with phrases like 'What this passage manages to achieve - in a remarkably deft and undogmatic way - is to stage all the facets of the debate pertaining to the representation of historical atrocity (pious and phony assertions of the 'death of irony' on the one hand, callous disregard for the loss of human life on the other), whilst remaining unscathed by the ideological excesses of either camp'. It was, in short, written to a formula of academic writing that preexisted the review itself; preexisted, in fact, my reading of Kennard's book, hampering in the process the immediacy of my response.

What I like about Luke Kennard is his brevity. He knows exactly when to stop.

Simon Turner - Reading Jeremy Hooker (Part One)

Jeremy Hooker, The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965 - 2005 (Enitharmon, 2006)

10/08/2007:

Last night, drinks and music, the usual yammer with George. I mentioned my discovery of the week - the last three lines of Hooker's poem 'City Walking (1)': "Sharp and bright / above petrol dusk / the evening star". Is discovery the right word? Implies some effort on my part, but Hooker did all the work in making the lines, surely? Still, they are beautiful, the effects of the lines revolving round the use of the word 'petrol', a component of our everyday language here made fresh and mysterious. So much use of metaphor or simile has the effect of closing down the possibilities of generating meaning, forcing the reader to see in a particular way. Here, 'petrol' opens up the field completely. So much meaning accrues to the word almost silently. That same evening had closed with a brilliant sunset, a gash of fuchsia set amid smudges of grey, the whole effect just visible behind the houses. 'Petrol', yes.

This morning, not yet fully awake, and flicking almost randomly through the pages of the book, I came across 'New Year's Day at Lepe', with its "delicate industrial sky", and was struck again by the simplicity of Hooker's language. He does not strain after effect, and every word is common currency: one or two syllables for the most part. Where he dazzles is in his arrangement, the music he creates from such small particles: like the shingle in that same poem, which "tinkled and grated as it dragged".

10/08/2007 - Later:

"What I love is the fact of it" ('Itchen Navigation')

Struck with the constant presence of the sea in Hooker's poems, and reminded of a conversation I had with Jon just the other day, about how my own writing was 'land-locked' - this was not an insult - but how he imagined me years down the line, living in some tiny fishing village, writing obsessively about the ocean, making up for lost time. Right now, as I'm writing this, I'm on a train heading down to London. It's evening, the light a subtle haze of apricot, the sun flickering like an old movie as it passes behind the trees. Tomorrow: Brighton, and the ocean waiting. Reading Hooker means, somehow, reading the world through Hooker. What will Brighton look like after absorbing all these poems about the ocean, after so many years spent inland, 'land-locked'?

Hooker's name: appropriate, his consonants like minute barbs catching the throat: "The curve of its cry - / A sculpture / Of the long beak: / A spiral carved from bone" ('Curlew'). I was cut off in my writing after that last sentence; our stop. Trees took the last of the sunlight, shades of tangerine, their long shadows roaring across the rutted fields, the ridges tinged with a heavy russet where the darkness struck. A shock of birds massed into a loose wedge flew before the sun, and vanished instantly.

11/08/2007:

Hooker writes, in 'A Poem for My Father', of "the painting of a cornfield / he could no longer see, / splashes of bright red, / bluish-green elms, the fullness / of summer days we could feel and smell." Painting is a recurrence in Hooker's poems - in one of the prose pieces in Their Silence a Language, he tells us how "A sleeping painter and a sleeping sculptor come awake in my senses" in the presence of the land-scape (the ocean, again) he has just described - but it is not used in any way which would suggest a post-modern focus upon the processes of the poem's own construction. Rather, it suggests (if this is possible) post-modernism's opposite: where post-modernism (usually) draws attention to its own processes in order to accentuate an essential difference, a gap, between the world and the word, Hooker employs painting metaphorically in order to voice a sensed continuity between being in the world, in the everyday, and the art made from those very same quotidian materials. Just as "the fullness / of summer days we could feel and smell" can be evoked, even reenacted, by a painting, so too is the painting (the poem) evoked by the landscape before it has been painted (written). Charles Simic wrote once that: "First comes being, then come words, then comes the poem". If I am reading Hooker right, he seems to be collapsing this succession of processes into one, simultaneous action: we see in order to make art; me make art in order to see. The best poems will sharpen our vision, almost imperceptibly, like a clear lens interposed between ourselves and the world.

A crowd of sparrows and starlings comes to the garden to feed on scraps of bread and fallen apples, the radio crooning from the kitchen. Dew still on the grass, insects thronging the air. The day is fresh and still, waiting for us to make something from it.

i-Pods and Jellyfish

Simon Turner reviews Generation Txt (Penned in the Margins, 2006), 75 pp. £6.99 ISBN 978-0-9553846-1-5

Tom Chivers, who edited this anthology of six young poets, opens his introduction to the selection in combative mode with a quote from Kate Clanchy that is almost parodically idiotic: "I started writing when I was 28. I don't think people really write anything worth reading before that." Mr Chivers is clearly more forgiving than I am - he is Darth Vader to my Emperor Palpatine - as he doesn't make the obvious comment ("Yes, Kate, and some people don't write poetry worth reading even after they're 28"), letting a list of young prodigies - including Keats, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen, Chatterton and Plath - do the talking for him.

The basis of Chivers' polemic is simple, but undeniable: that the establishment, although making some notional nods to new writers every few years or so, goes out of its way for the most part to ignore work written by younger writers. And when it does make tokenistic efforts to promote 'new' writing (witness the PoSoc New Gen poets promotional bumph from all those years back) it spectacularly misreads what 'new' actually means. Young writers do flourish, but it's on the fringes of the poetry 'scene': in the poetry slam and open mic circuits, or amongst little presses or internet operations, like Penned in the Margins, strangely enough. As such, this collections isn't doing anything monstrously ground-breaking, but what is interesting is its all-purpose quality, and the multimedia brouhaha which goes with it: not only do we have the anthology itself (more on the contents in a moment), we have the nationwide tour, a MySpace page, and an official website too. It's certainly far more real - and far more effective - as a means of conveying the work to the public than the media-saturated razzle dazzle of the approved Faber and Bloodaxe types who dominated the New and Next Gen lists; and what's more, it gives us both page and performance poetries, closing the gap between the two, which can only be a good thing.

What's most impressive, though, is the genuine (formal) diversity on display here. Joe Dunthorne, who opens the anthology, gives us sestinas and villanelles; Inua Ellams gives us great rolling hymns of poems designed for the open space of the theatre; James Wilkes has his postcards and vertical poems; Abigail Oborne has her square sonnets and fractured herky-jerky prose poems. So, what of the work itself? Dunthorne's a nice opener, with a strong line in knotty language and rhythmic solidity:

Rubens milks filth from the bib-heavy maid's basket
of fruit. No ambiguity here as the hand of a cad
with a ya-know-ya-would smirk parts the labia
of a clit-stoned fig. I'm thinking Viz.

('Rubens' paintings at the National Gallery')

Lovely, mouth-filling stuff; the reference to Viz really makes the passage, I feel. Though this quote strangely points to both Dunthorne's strengths and his weaknesses simultaneously; and whilst he's assured when employing this highly wrought idiom, his work seems more fulfilling when he tones it down a little, as in the likable poem that closes his selection, 'Taking a Photo of Workmen in Chapelfields Gardens', or the strange surrealist narrative of 'I Made a Grown Woman Cry Last Night'. One of his poems contains jellyfish, which is always a gold star in my book.

Inua Ellams' material would, I suspect, work best in performance, as on the page some of its rhetorical flourishes and alliterative effects didn't quite achieve lift off for this reader. That said, there's a lot of power and passion in these poems, and the best of his selection - 'Epic', 'Lizards and Lollypop Sticks' - achieves a cumulative force reminiscent of Ginsberg circa-'Sunflower Sutra', or the performance poetry of Saul Williams.

Arguably, Laura Forman is a more consistent poet than either Dunthorne or Ellams, but seems to take fewer risks than either. As such, though there isn't anything particularly wrong with what she's attempting, and there were some lovely moments here - the use of estate-agent speak to talk about death in 'For Sale', or the arresting opening line of 'Attention' ('You let me abseil down your forehead') - I can't honestly claim that her work particularly engaged me. I've seen material like this in any number of mainstream collections, and the more interesting material here (the aforementioned 'For Sale', for example) had the quality of workshop exercises. Forman clearly has a talent for well-wrought images - 'The sky was up early today, / Scrubbing away last night's stars / With summer soap and an old, thin cloud / For a healthy blue glow' - but I would have liked a more formal daring to go with it.

In the case of Emma McGordan, I'd like to dwell on the good (the concision of 'Punks & Patchouli', the telegraphic violence of 'Sonnet to the Soviet'), rather than the bad ('Sexy Anne's Plan', ''The System'). McGordon's only really just starting out, so her work might improve, but her work at the moment is rather undeveloped, lapsing into cliche on a regular basis, and some lines - see, for example, 'Sexy Anne would take / The circus stand / So to speak to every man / And tell them of / The Sexy Anne Plan' - are strikingly clunky.

Abigail Oborne, on the other hand, is the real deal, and if some of the poems here seem a little too eager to please, this is for the most part top-notch work. 'Suffering', in particular, is alert to how language is used and abused in everyday life, and focuses on our attempts (and failures) to talk eloquently about violence and trauma, with facts and figures from the newspapers jostling with inelegant attempts to give voice to personal tragedies:

when the tsunami
two hundred thousand people
my wife's mother

eight day's later we heard that she'd died
getting the chicken
her father dropped down dead

Oborne's blurb cites Frank O'Hara as an influence, and his 'I go here, I do this' mode of writing is inherited in 'The World' and 'Sunday Ten to Three', the second of which is one of the best things in this anthology; whilst O'Hara's New York fellow-traveller, Ted Berrigan, is a ghostly presence in Oborne's not-quite sonnets ('when I say I love you / it sounds like the flip / of a cheque book'). A-grade, and another gold star.

Jellyfish recur in James Wilkes' poems, which of course automatically puts me in a good mood, as does Wilkes' shape-shifting attitude to form. Arguably the most exciting of the poets on display here, this brief selection gives us postcard poems, permutational poems, vertical poems, collage and ecological satire. Which is a fairly good showing for a small handful of pages. Wilkes' thing seems to be the use of the page as an extra dimension in the construction of meaning; form is an element of content, and vice versa. The vertical poem, for instance ('Score for a Nocturne'), compels the reader to either read from left to right, or from top to bottom. The first method yields this first line: 'the hissing electric loops'; the second this alternative: 'the night cantata of patched mirrors passing city cinematic lighthouse swept past'. One poem contains at least two possibilities of alternative readings; there are most likely as many potential poems here as there are potential readers. 'Postcard from Rochester' similarly shatters the notion of linear reading, allowing for vertical reading, horizontal reading, circular reading, any which way. It would be very interesting to see how this work is performed on stage, as it seems dependent to a great extent upon the extra dimension of the page for its effects, but that's altogether another matter. All told, this is excellent stuff.

So, then, a mixed bag, but that's always the way with anthologies. I do, however, think that this anthology for the most part points to rude health amongst the youngsters on the poetry scene (though some of them are the same age as me, so I don't know where that leaves me...), and offers alternatives to the tedium of the current crop of mainstream not-so-bright stars. Young poets should get their hands on it, if only to give them a sense of the world beyond Picador hegemony. But the people who should really be reading - like Clanchy, perhaps - will no doubt be dismissing it out of hand before they've even scanned the cover.

Hidden Forms

I was chatting with someone yesterday who described how he has lately been working with speech recognition software to edit his poetry. He takes one of his old poems and reads it into the computer. The software then invents its own version of the spoken poem as text. He repeats this process until he arrives at something he likes, or can work with.

I put that idea together with this one, from this article over at n+1:

Paintings, apart from the very occasional tondo or altarpiece triangle, all start out as rectangles... Its impolite rival and savior is now called postminimalism, but it went by many names: body art, performance art, conceptual art, land art, protest art, process art, anti-art art... Not having been there, we learn about these new art forms from the leftover paraphernalia. Books and museums show us black and white photographs, gallery invites, artists’ statements and manifestos—all of minimal visual interest—and the putatively unrectangular event gets reduced, through a ruse of history, into that very familiar rectangle: the 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of copy paper in a course packet.

It's amazing how unimaginative the process of poetry composition often is. Sitting with paper and pen - often described as the most liberating tools because they're cheap, readily available and can be used in most environments - is the stereotype, the cliché of composition. Strangely, not a lot has changed over the centuries. We've seen phases of oral composition and recital, but that's about it. Poetry on paper, or poetry out of the mouth. Public poetry, such as Gwyneth Lewis' poem for the Wales Millennium Centre, can seem downright experimental in light of the endless trend of paper and pen poets. It's fairly likely, though, that it was composed on a sheet of paper first.

The computer, another kind of paper, was a revolution for writing in some ways. One which many writers seem to reject - any number of them, from Peter Scupham through to A S Byatt, still compose their first drafts in the traditional manner. Those that embrace the technologies delve into the weird like gizmo-addicts - speech recognition software, machine translation tools and text scramblers are bells-and-whistle devices, fast action methods for older techniques of cut ups and language distortion. But the downside of computers is being forced to work within their parameters.

I always get annoyed when a process's limitation, which has been insiduously working upon me, becomes transparent. Some of the new ones are obvious like spelling and grammar checkers. They drive me mad, particularly the automatic capitalisation of new lines (a great, heterogenising act if ever I saw one) - I've heard some creative writing tutors even teach their students how to get rid of it.

It can be used in your favour though. Mario Petrucci used an automatic spellchecker's suggestions on WC Williams' 'This is to say' to make his own poem. Arguably, they bring everyone who can't type or spell competently up to a certain level of mediocrity. It also means they don't bother to read their work through carefully, leading to a neglect of language, perhaps even encouraging laziness. (The rise of blogging may be a sympton of enabling this neglect further.) It also brings people with a bit more deftness down a few pegs, particularly people who aren't so hot with technology and software and find themselves struggling to translate their weird and wonderful page drafts onto a machine.

Cross-platform poetry winds me up. Moving a poem from computer to computer, program to program; even trying to make a poem appear cleanly in blogger without some compromise of layout or font, is an effort beyond what it should be. As one West Indian poet said to me (about the after effects of colonialism on his homeland's language, though it seems relevant), "That's hegemony at work." In response though, poets like Charlie Dark create one-off poems (I think he called them 'dumplings') that he only reads at the particular event he's at and then never again. A kind of theatre improvisation poetry perhaps. It's a rebellion against the infinite array of storage chips, the Google Archiving, the digitisation of life.

Or there's the art-poems, painted straight onto their exhibition surfaces. In Athens during the German occupation, people could be executed for writing grafitti. In that context, a single epsilon, symbolising the Greek work 'eleutheria', or freedom, became challenging, avant garde. A kind of art poetry - the context created the depth of meaning. Banksy-style modern poets perhaps lack the context, but the form of placing your poetry onto walls, into the public domain, is similar, shaping the poet's awareness of audience, the font, the content.

Forms of process can both enliven the imagination and also leave it running in the same hamster wheel as everyone else. I started writing this with a vague sort of optimism at having heard about a new composition and rewriting method. Will it lead to great swatches of charged imagery, or just a fizzle of sparks in a snowstorm? Here at the end, fingers on the keyboard, eyes aching from a day staring at screens, followed by more screen-staring to muster this into the world, paper and pen don't seem so unappealing a recourse.

But at the same time, not much has altered - where is the next advance on the page, or the screen? What other ways do we have to resist? The page is the mainstream when it comes to the tools of the craft. More questions than answers, as usual.

Simon Turner - Some thoughts on the 'mainstream'

Paul Farley, in September 2006, penned an article in the Guardian Review entitled 'Lines of Resistance', which professed to be a defence of 'mainstream' poetics. Like many such defences, it was actually a thinly disguised attack, and is in a tradition of similar sideswipes, which seem to be making something of a comeback at the moment. The gist of Farley's 'argument' (and it has this in common with other comparable diatribes) is this: 'mainstream' has become a dirty word within poetry circles; the experimentalists have taken hold of the academy, and are preaching a virulent combination of formless poetics and covert Stalinist politics; that 'the modernist century' somehow engendered a 'break between poetry and its readers' (this in spite of the fact that modernism in its most difficult forms is hardly a mass art, so how this could have inculcated a mass exodus of readers is beyond me - the alienation of the 'common reader' from poetry began a long time before modernism. Surely this was a vital component of their discourse on readership and poetry production? Aaaanyway. . .); and so on.

What's interesting, and troubling, about the article - and this is something that Geraldine Monk also noted in her response letter published the following week - is the way it evades the fact that the 'mainstream' is so called because it is the dominant current within modern poetry; it is what most readers read - whether this is because mainstream poetry is more readily available than experimental work is another matter. One might also want to ask where mainstream is a dirty word? On university creative writing courses, perhaps? Not really: St Andrews University, foe example, numbers John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie amongst its teaching staff; Sheffield Hallam's had Sean O'Brien on its payroll, another mainstream attack dog; and Andrew Motion's taught at a number of institutions.

Okay then, the press: except here too the mainstream has much of the control, and where it has occasionally lost power (during the Potts-Herd years at the Poetry Review and Guardian poetry pages) it has, with almost Stalinist ferocity, wrested control back from the enemy. The TLS, the LRB, the de-clawed Poetry Review and Guardian Review, are all distinctly mainstream in their coverage.

Oh, in that case it must be the prizes; the Cambridge collective must have the Forward sewn up. Except, of course, the opposite is the case once again, Neil Astley having pointed towards a Picador-centric bias in the judging system some time ago.

I apologise for this rather heavy-handed irony, but I feel that it's necessary in order to unpick the essentially fraudulent terms of Farley's analysis. Upon even the most perfunctory inspection, the key accusation made in the article - that mainstream poetics are a dying art, and need to be defended against the imagined 'post-modernist' barbarians - is proven to be a lot of hot air. There is, of course, an entirely different agenda at play here, one which Farley attempts to keep behind the curtain; but, sadly, we can still see the shoes. This alleged defence of mainstream values (which seem to be in rude health in spite of Farley's assistance) is in short a bullish assault on 'experimental' poetics (or, rather, experimental poetics as defined by the mainstream, a definition so ill informed that it sees no difference between the popular public poetry of Ginsberg, and the far more rarefied work springing up in the wake of the innovations of the Black Mountain school, the 'British Poetry Revival', and the 'language-centred' poetics of Ron Silliman and co, which to my mind at least represent the dominant inheritances of 'experimentalism' or 'post-avant' poetics on both sides of the Atlantic. Ginsberg's influence, if it persists, can be seen more readily in slam and performance poetries).

Which brings me back to an earlier point: that 'mainstream' when applied to aesthetics is effectively meaningless, as the term only has valency in relation to matters of economic and historical contingency - who is in charge of the big presses, which reviewing organs have the biggest circulation, the class, ethnic and gender make-up of the readership at any given time, etc. The aesthetics of the mainstream will shift according to these dictates; the formula cannot be reversed. That is to say that an aesthetic - whatever that aesthetic is - cannot be mainstream once it has ceased to be the dominant mode of discourse and production. The binary constructed by the mainstream - 'mainstream' vs 'avant garde' is, then, based upon a confusion of categories. The 'avant garde' can lay claim to an aesthetics - one equally dependent upon historical, economic and social contingency, but an aesthetic nonetheless - but the mainstream cannot, or, more correctly, their conflation of aesthetics and economics (of poetry production, and poetry consumption) is deeply misleading. In short, I guess what I'm saying is that when Farley and his mainstream brethren are no longer on top, so to speak, then they will have cause for complaint; but, when that happens, they'll no longer be mainstream, and the terms of the debate will no longer be in their control.