|
|
Anthologies
of British mainstream poetry have tended to generate considerable
controversy. This is because they are not really concerned with poetry per se
but with poetry as a mirror of the nation and its moral life. The convergence
of nation, morality and poetry dates from Robert Conquest's New Lines (1956). Conquest argued that
the anthology's nine poets represented 'a genuine and healthy poetry of the
new period' and 'a new and healthy general standpoint'. His narrative of
recovery from recent sickness was reinforced by references to 'corruption',
'debilitating theory' and 'a condition' and by dismissals of poetry dominated
by 'the Id', 'unconscious commands', 'sentimentalism', 'unpleasant
exhibitionism' and 'sentimentality'. These generalised terms stood in for any
detailed aesthetic argument because, as Conquest was forced to admit, the New
Lines poets
shared 'little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles'.
At the same time, the poetry's 'empirical...attitude' was 'a part of the
general intellectual ambience (in so far as that is not blind or
retrogressive) of our time.' 'Ambience' is another generalised word that
echoes Conquest's use of 'atmosphere' (3 times), 'moods' and 'mood'. The
implication is that if you have to ask for clearer definitions then you are
part of the problem.
Conquest's introduction established some important aspects of mainstream
poetry anthologies. First, there is a dismissal of the recent past and a
hailing of the present as a site of changes, shifts, trends or emergent
groupings. Second, there is the editor presenting a generalised account of
insider knowledge. Finally, this generalisation removes the burden of having
to justify the selection as a unified whole. This pattern was largely
reproduced in subsequent anthologies but with greater focus on history and
politics. For The New Poetry
(1962), Alvarez redefined the restraint of Conquest's poets as 'the gentility
principle' and demanded that poets wake up to history and engage with 'the
forces of disintegration'. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's The Penguin
Book of Contemporary British Poetry
(1982) dismissed 'The implication of The New Poetry that a correlation necessarily
exists between gravity of subject and quality of achievement'. They argued
that poetry hadn't developed in that direction and offered Seamus Heaney as
their exemplary poet: someone whose work derived from 'The Movement virtues
of common sense, craftsmanship, and explication' but had developed into
oblique, refracting fiction-making. And just as Conquest had buttressed his
argument with a lengthy quotation from Coleridge, so Morrison and Motion did
the same with Keats.
The 1993 Bloodaxe anthology I co-edited with Michael Hulse and David Morley
originally had the working title of Eighties/Nineties but ended up borrowing
Alvarez's title to justify its argument for significant change. The
introduction was a naively-pluralist, pro-postmodernist, anti-Thatcher
polemic which offered rather over-determined arguments about the extent to
which the poetry it collected challenged the age. One other notable feature
of these anthologies is the contracting or expanding movement they enact:
Conquest (9 poets), Alvarez (28 poets), Morrison/Motion (20 poets),
Hulse/Kennedy/Morley (55 poets). It's clear that the Conquest and
Morrison/Motion anthologies reflect periods of cultural and political
isolationism, conservatism, and cynicism about or exhaustion with ideas of
community and the collective. Alvarez's anthology is very much of the
'Sixties while the Hulse/Kennedy/Morley New Poetry's celebration of diversity was
a rejection of Thatcherism's anti-society which, with hindsight, looks
increasingly like a cover for the impossibility of drawing any meaningful
sketch of the contemporary scene.
This, then, is the cultural history into which Voice Recognition, the latest anthology to shout
'tomorrow belongs to us', seeks to write itself. And this writing into
history is quite self-conscious as James Byrne and Clare Pollard invoke
Alvarez's anthology and its 'excellent introduction' to argue that 'Technique
is not enough. Talent must be fuelled by the experience of a life outside of
the poems.' So it's down with the 'mere recounting of anecdotes or minor
stagings of epiphany' and 'make way' for poetry that benefits from 'the
creative stimuli that can be found through travel, translation or through a
broad appreciation of visual art' and 'a wide appreciation of the
'confessional' American poets'. There are, however, some important surface
differences. Previous anthologies have often found themselves arguing for
shifts that are already over. This was true of Morrison/Motion and the
Bloodaxe New Poetry.
Voice Recognition
describes a recognisable contemporary scene. Unlike its predecessors, Voice
Recognition
doesn't have a title that refers to poetry. And this is reflected in the
poetry world that the introduction sketches, a world that is predominantly
performance-driven. It's also reflected in a sentence that would have been
impossible to write a few years ago: Jay Bernard 'is a DJ for the Poetry
Society and podcasts regularly.'
Voice Recognition
is full of strange sentences. Here's another from the 'Acknowledgements':
'thanks to [...] faculty from many universities who provided
recommendations'. This reflects the fact that none of poets have published a
full-length collection and that many of them have undertaken some form of
graduate studies. But at the same time, the editors can't decide what they
think about creative writing and the academy. They tell us that 'Almost every
university going seems to have a poetry course, which is frequently backed by
renowned faculty.' This is another strange sentence which is typical of the
introduction's style. Byrne and Pollard combine the enthusiastic 'must see'
tone of listings mags with a kind of semi-skilled academic discourse. The
result is that meaning is produced by a kind of random pointing. The first
half of the sentence sounds a note of exhaustion that seems to promise
disapproval, and yet the second half suddenly swerves into a kind of awkward
reverence. And what does 'backed' mean? 'Supported by' as in 'approved of' or
'backed up' as in 'underpinned'? Similarly, the poets in Voice Recognition 'have range, dare and
vitality'. But you can't 'have dare' just as Alvarez was clearly asking for
something more profound than life experience.
To return to creative writing and the academy, Byrne and Pollard tell us that
MAs in creative writing 'can encourage conformities of style' and 'many of
the same-sounding, low-stake, well-mannered (but going nowhere) poems we read
whilst putting together this anthology were from poets who had recently come
along the MA conveyor-belt.' As a consequence, 'we've tried to avoid any
poets who conform to archetypes of academic orderliness (though many of our
poets have benefited a great deal from graduate study)'. The idea that
British MA programmes are collectively teaching a latter-day version of the
well-made poem is bizarre. (My experience is that most creative writing
students want to write fantasy fiction anyway.) But one suspects
that this is Voice
Recognition's
own version of attacking the recent past as many MAs are overseen or taught
by poets who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. As David Cameron
remarked to Tony Blair in his first House of Commons speech as Tory leader
(07.12.05), 'you were the future once'.
Tony Blair and David Cameron are not as remote from this anthology as one
might think. A group of poets whose reference points are an anthology that
is nearly 50 years old, Rilke, Pound and American confessional poets and whose
work represents (incredibly) 'after years of other regions being prominent,
[...] a real shift back to the capital' has an odd sense of poetry, history,
politics and just about everything else. What they have, in fact, is a gap,
and it is a gap they share despite Voice Recognition representing three distinct
generations: b.1988-1991, b.1984-6, and b.1977-1982. This gap is the result
of having grown up through the Blair era. Margaret Thatcher's infamous
assertion that 'there is no such thing as society, only individual men and
women and their families' was rewritten by New Labour in a variety of ways.
One version might be, say, 'there is no such thing as ideology, only things
that work and things that don't' or 'there is no such thing as the United
Kingdom, only individual nations and their diversity'. But to deny society
or ideology or nation is to remove any way of defining the self and the result
is that your only reference point is yourself and your convictions. This
explains the feeling throughout the introduction of the editors struggling
to
define their poets against
anything. Indeed, the 'recognition' in the anthology's title is highly
significant because previous mainstream anthologies clearly were matters of
definition. The cultural moment that James Byrne and Clare Pollard describe
is, in contrast, dehistoricized, depoliticized, and, to coin a word,
de-literate. Or, as Ahren Warner puts it in 'Epistle', 'there are no signs
of our times'. The present is unreadable without a sense of the very recent
past
and this is why voters will believe in New Toryism and elect David Cameron
as the next Prime Minister.
What does this mean for the poetry? I've already suggested that the emphasis
on 'voice' might tell us something about the poetry and there is a lot of
work here that probably sounds great in a reading or on a podcast and that,
in the editors' words, has benefitted from 'an increased awareness of how to
deliver a poem to an audience'. This also means that there is a lot of
largely formless free verse that lacks any inevitability on the page. But
what's most surprising in the context of a generation-defining anthology is
the number of voices here that seem to lack confidence or to revel in an
inability to communicate. In Heather Phillipson's 'Crossing the Col
d'Aubisque', the speaker 'could say a lot about a lot of things' but would
'rather hear the stereo' and finds that 'The Smiths are in synch / with what
I don't express'. Similarly, in Jack Underwood's 'Bonnie 'Prince' Billy', the
eponymous singer not the poet 'sings how ugly and complex / I have become.'
Ailbhe Darcy's 'He tells me I have a peculiar relationship with my city'
describes 'my country' as 'a narrow, self-effacing swathe, / the shape of
me'. The speaker of Jay Bernard's '109' tells us 'I don't know if I can talk'
and the mother in Emily Berry's 'The Mother's Tale' 'won't share a drop of
emotion'. All this has the curious effect of suggesting that the mainstay of
mainstream poetry, the personal lyric, is largely inoperative. And what this
leaves are,
pace Byrne and Pollard, large quantities of anecdote and minor epiphany.
In contrast, the few poets who seem genuinely interested in doing something
with form, language and voice--Siddartha Bose, Mark Leech, Toby Martinez de
las Rivas, Sophie Robinson and Ahren Warner--catch the reader's attention with
an often quite pronounced sense of provisionality and unpredictability. The
opening of Sophie Robinson's 'unspeakable' is a good example: 'Your name
swallows my lips & / the backward downward rage of all / girls knocking
through me'. But so too is Mark Leech's 'Snowfall in Woodland' with its
opening 'There's a curve that promises' and its repeated 'I turn my head
towards'. These poets have visibly and audibly thought about what is involved
in the act of reading and how different types of text produce different
reading styles. These poets seem to have thought about the fact that readers
bring their own fantasies to bear upon whatever they read and, consequently,
their poems repay re-reading because there's much less sense of them
colluding with the usual readers of poetry. Crucially, the work of these
poets converges with what the mainstream dismisses as avant garde or
experimental poetry.
It would be pleasant to think that this was an encouraging sign but five out
twenty-one is a small number and it would be wrong to overburden these poets
with hopes or fears for the future. And, as we have seen, anthologies with a
relatively small number of poets tend to reflect exhaustion, a coming
conservatism, or a combination of both. The poetry collected in Voice
Recognition
seems largely unaware of and unconcerned with what has dominated British
mainstream poetry since about 1950: anxieties about class, region, gender and
race. James Byrne and Clare Pollard are the first anthology editors to show
no interest in poetry as a mirror of the nation. In this, of course, they
only reflect the attitudes of their chosen poets. But it makes Voice Recognition an early monument to a
post-national poetry. The editors and their poets have removed one of
poetry's principle claims for recognition: its ability to offer unique
insights into the relationships between private and public and between self
and nation that define us all.
© David
Kennedy 2009
|