Poetry? Please!
Catherine Murray-Browne takes a look at contemporary verse, (whilst politely encouraging us all to stop writing crap poetry)
From a publisher’s perspective, more people write poetry than read it. Time and money that could be spent in bookshops seems, instead, to be spent creating work that forms the ‘slush pile’: an increasing number of unsolicited manuscripts that have to be read and, in almost all cases, rejected. During work experience at a publisher of contemporary poetry, I spent hours trawling these manuscripts. If you write yourself, it is heartening to realise that so much amateur poetry is terrible. If you aim to discover an unknown talent, it is depressing – as is the fact that if you do unearth a diamond in the truly rough, it probably represents a financial loss. Hence there are few thriving poetry publishers; many are subsidised, as are organisations such as the Poetry Book Society that work to promote contemporary poetry. As a result, one could be forgiven for thinking that poetry has no place in the mainstream.
But this is not the case. Poetry is currently very popular, but whether this is heartening or depressing depends on your viewpoint. A recent marketing strategy rebranded it as an emotional crutch in anthology form: All the Poems You Need to Say Goodbye, 101 Poems that Could Save Your Life and Essential Poems to Fall in Love With were published within the last three years, along with countless variations on the same theme. Daisy Goodwin, editor of the latter two volumes and author of a poetry column in the Daily Mail, has become the face of accessible poetry, largely by stressing the benefits it has for your emotional wellbeing. On www.daisygoodwin.co.uk, you can visit the Poetry Doctor who asks how you are feeling. Choosing from a rather limited range of options (‘I feel stressed out!’, ‘I’m having an affair’), the Doctor ‘prescribes’ a poem to help with your particular difficulty. For instance, if you click ‘I’m just depressed’, Keats’ ‘Ode to Melancholy’ appears, with Daisy’s slightly sickening introduction: ‘When the clouds eventually lifet [sic], you are left with a new appreciation for life – like the new smells that one notices after a storm.’
Goodwin’s poetical analysis is not exactly sophisticated: she focuses solely on emotional content and biography, while other readings are neglected. Her critics argue that this is bland and reductive: by telling you what a poem ‘means’, Goodwin negates the need to think, read or investigate further. Indeed, the sight of a Wordsworth poem laid out like an article in Cosmopolitan (pink and purple graphics, and photographs of women in knee-high boots) is so unappealing, that it is tempting to dismiss Goodwin’s opinion entirely and hurriedly distinguish her own work from ‘real poetry’.
But what is ‘real poetry’ exactly? The concept of poetry having some emotional content is not the preserve of Goodwin. Anyone who still believes that emotion is the antithesis of intellect has obviously never read a love poem. AE Housman, poet and scholar, and a figure comically different from Goodwin, shares the argument that poetry can console; his preface to More Poems reads thus:
They say my verse is sad: no wonder;
Its narrow measure spans
Tears of eternity, and sorrow,
Not mine, but man’s.
This is for ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble,
And I am not.
He liked to keep his poetry and scholarship separate, but as Professor of Latin at UCL, it would be difficult to dismiss him as lowbrow. A reading of Housman’s work that focused solely on its emotional content would be reductive; but then so would one that dismissed it. As crass as Goodwin’s approach may be, it does not offer a completely ludicrous way of looking at verse.
Another increasingly important factor in poetry’s growing popularity is live performance. Poetry Idol is a tournament for performance poets, voted for by the audience. In the heat that I attended, six poets performed and two winners were selected. The popularity of the contest was surprising, as was the quality and energy of the performers. Voting for your poet not only adds an edge of excitement to the evening but makes you think about the criteria on which you judge poetry. Admittedly there is an element of performance that has little to do with writing: the poets who won were both physically striking and charismatic. But the sound of the poem is integral to its nature; a reading that emphasises, even at the expense of its other aspects, can be enlightening.
Neither TS Eliot nor Alfred Lord Tennyson would have fared too well at Poetry Idol. In early recordings, Eliot reading The Waste Land in his booming, antiquated voice sounds comical to a modern ear and therefore completely at odds with most readings of the poem. An ageing and tentative Tennyson makes ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ sound feeble. But this perhaps strengthens the
argument for spoken word poetry. If a bad performance of great poetry can be detrimental to our understanding, it is just as likely that a good performance can enrich it.
To judge whether a poem should be considered inspirational or deadening is, in a way, to judge the quality of unknown readers’ intellectual life: uncertain and presumptuous territory. And whatever else more mainstream verse may sometimes do to offend, it does fuel the idea that poetry has a place in our culture, which keeps subsidies forthcoming. And so, despite the many problems the industry faces, non-profit poetry continues to be published and promoted: the new writing published by Faber, Picador and Bloodaxe is proof of that. The only real danger we face is that, in dismissing some poems as ‘lowbrow’, we perhaps risk losing sight of the very nature of poetry.
