Getting poetry

Here in the UK it was said of our last prime minister that he didn’t ‘get’ it which is one of the main reasons that he was thrown out. In the popular press our current leaders a portayed as ‘arrogant posh boys’ who don’t ‘get’ it either. In both cases this relates to a failure to understand / identify with the experiences of the ordinary citizen.

I’ve given this some thought with regard to poetry and the sad fact that most people don’t feel that they ‘get’ it in that they don’t see the point of it or how it might relate to them. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only a very small amount of verse that I can see the point of and a very small proportion of that is poetry that I feel might relate / speak to me.

For me ‘getting’ a poem is not the same as understanding it, I can work out what poems ‘mean’ but this does not mean that I can see the point of them nor does it mean that I can relate personally to them.

I’ll proceed by example, I don’t see the point of Auden, Hopkins, Rilke, Dryden and many others because they don’t seem to be saying anything either useful or different. I’ll readily admit that I might need to spend more time with these but an initial period of attention has failed to impress.

I can see the point of a lot of religious verse in that some of it is both useful and sufficiently different to hold my attention but I can’t relate to it, it says little to me about how I live my life even though I understand and appreciate the way that it says what it has to say. I’m thinking primarily of George Herbert and RS Thomas.

There are very few bodies of work that I can relate to in their entirety- only Andrew Marvell and Elizabeth Bishop spring to mind as poets whose work seems consistently ‘pointful’ and relates to my life in the clattering now. By ‘relate’ I think I mean those poems that I don’t have to think about, those that reflect / embody ways that I have thought and felt so that I know instinctively what’s going on. Writing this I realise that I could and should go on for a very long time about how I know (absolutely) the mind and the impulse that made “The Moose” the poem that it is.

Then there are those poems that I can see the point of but only bits of them speak to me. Some of these bits speak of my experiences and some of the way that I think and feel. The wedding reception scene in Keston Sutherland’s ‘Stress Position’ speaks to both my experience of mental illness and to the way that I think about it and does so in a deeply humane, unselfish kind of way. I can relate to and see the point of the strangeness of the human condition as set out in Books 3 and 5 of ‘The Faerie Queene’ even though my view of Book 5 is far away from the current consensus. I can, of course, see the point of the rest and iy is all magnificent but it doesn’t have the same complexity / nuance / strangeness of 3 and 5. I absolutely ‘get’ Milton’s discussion of evil in ‘Paradise Lost’ and this does speak to my experiences of working with people who do Bad (terrible) Things, I’m also of the view that this particular poem is the best thing ever produced anywhere but the description of Eden (whilst technically a tour de force) is quite boring (to me). ‘Maximus’ is nearly the perfect poem in that it contains so many things that tell me what it’s like to be alive, about place, process and the archive, but the material relating to myth just doesn’t reach me.

Understanding isn’t a prerequisite of getting a poem, in fact it can sometimes get in the way. Some of the work of Paul Celan and J H Prynne I can see the point of and it seems to embody how it is for me but I don’t claim to have a complete grasp of what’s being said. With Celan, obvious examples are ‘Aschenglorie’ and ‘Erblinde’, with Prynne, there are moments of absolute clarity in ‘Streak~~Willing~~Entourage~~Artesian’ and a whole range of ideas going on in ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ that do seem to speak of the now.

Here’s a bit of a confession, Geoffrey Hill’s ‘The Mercian Hymns’ and ‘The Triumph of Love’ are stuffed with point and are two of the finest poems that we have (there is no argument with this as it is obviously a fact) but it is the short poems about landscape that I relate to most because (as with Olson) they put into words (embody) what it is like for me to be in a place. I’m incredibly grateful for this because it (social work term) validates and oddly anticipates the feelings that I have.

There is another dimension to getting poetry and this relates to tactics, There are some poets that write poetry that moves things forward and there are those poets that maintain a / the status quo. It is usually reasonably straightforward to identify these poets. Between 1960 and his suicide in 1970, Paul Celan wrote tactically important poems, J H Prynne has spent the last forty years making tactical / strategic interventions, ‘Howl’ is tactically crucial to an understanding of Where We are Now. I don’t agree with asingle word that Kenneth Goldsmith has ever uttered but ‘Traffic’ is something that I ‘get’ and something that is likely to be seen as quite pivotal.

We now come to to poems that I get as poems and that make tactical sense. These are very few in number because I’m a particularly opinionated individual and (I like to think) my standards are high. There is Vanessa Place whose work mirrors ‘how it is’ for me and who rattles many cages whilst pointing out how what we call poetry can begin to reclaim some degree of relevance in these provisional and vague times. There is also the work of Sarah Kelly that speaks to me but also makes a voice that must be heard above and against the prevailing din. Both of these two set up a kind of imperative (must be read / cannot be ignored) and yet they are utterly different, the only link being what they do to the inside of my head.

The importance of poetry

The arduity project that I’m currently working on has given me more than a few problems. Trying to encourage people to read difficult poetry has led me to describe certain poets and certain poems as ‘important’. This has now become a cliché in my head as well as on the page so I’ve decided to work out what we mean when we say that ‘The Triumph of Love’ is important or that Paul Celan is important.
I’ll start with the importance of poetry as a means of expression. Ever since I read and understood my first ‘adult’ poem I’ve known instinctively that poetry was somehow important but decided not to work out why. This intuitive knowledge is problematic because it is really hard to explain but I can give something of a definition by separating out my notion of importance from that expressed by others. There is a view that poetry is in a privileged position because it can provide a closer indication of the truth than any other form of expression. I reject this view because I have yet to see any empirical evidence to support it and because this claim is the kind of thing that gives poetry a bad name.
My notion of the importance of poetry would rest on the fact that it isn’t prose and that it is incredibly versatile. Not being prose removes the poem from ordinary speech and enables all kinds of devices to give expression to deep emotion and profound ideas. Poetry, at its best, can be both incredibly beautiful and packed with meaning at the same time in a way that other forms of art can only aspire to.
This notion of versatility combined with a kind of strength has stayed with me since I was thirteen when a single line from a poem suddenly made sense. Nothing that I have read or tried to write since has caused me to change my view that poetry is really important but not that important.

So, why is it that I feel that some poets are ‘important’ and others not? I must stress that this isn’t an argument about the canon which (I would argue) has little to do with importance but an investigation as to why I feel that I can make an instinctive judgement  about a poem’s importance before I fully understand it.

First of all, poetry has to hold my attention and it has to be honest. This will always weed out about 95% of what’s been written. Heaney isn’t important because he doesn’t hold my attention, Larkin isn’t important because he’s dishonest and manipulative (I could go on).  Muldoon holds my attention but there’s this lurking suspicion that he’s dishonest. Of the Movement poets, I can make the strongest case for Thom Gunn in terms of interest and integrity. Elizabeth Bishop’s work is always interesting and honest and the degree of technical skill marks her out as ‘important’.

Modernist poetry gave poets a whole new set of crayons and the ‘late’ modernists continue to exploit this potential. For all its many faults, modernism did open up the possibilities of poetry and this trend should be seen as important because it represents a major break from what has gone before. Hill, Prynne, Celan, Olson and Matthias have all pushed this potential and produced work that is interesting, honest and complex. Sometimes the crayons don’t quite work as intended but that’s inevitable when something new is attempted and when you’re pushing the versatility of poetry to its limit.

Poetry that is important is poetry that is innovative, complex, honest, technically accomplished and interesting because it stands out from the rest of what is being produced and because it is clear that the poet is deadly serious about making poems.

‘The Triumph of Love’, for example, meets this criteria even if some of the devices used don’t actually work (the faux editorial gloss and the angry response to critics) because other factors more than compensate. Very few people on this planet are more serious about poetry than Geoffrey Hill.

Having written the above, I now have a lurking suspicion that Paul Muldoon might be more important than I thought……