Poetry about poetry

In Hans Christian Anderson's story, "The poet who was born too late", previous poets have used up subjects. The poet goes to a fortune-teller who tells him to try her spectacles. He discovers that potatoes, bees, and passersby all have stories to tell. But when he takes the spectacles off he hears nothing. "Write about poetry and you'll be rich," the fortune-teller says.

"We very rarely publish a poem about poems ... There is a kind of self-absorption which is not very appealing" (Tom Clyde, editor of HU in 1995). This seems to be a common view amongst editors - I received the following on a rejection slip: "in the main I'm not interested in poems about poetry. Let the poem exemplify poetry by its technique & register, & be about something else". Poets and readers often distrust the genre too - "Above all, I am not concerned with poetry" (Wilfred Owen). I think that several factors are involved in this viewpoint

• an over-reaction to the dreaded "sonnets about sonnets" fad of centuries ago
• a trend away from "essay poems", especially if they have a didactic component
• a feeling that people only write about poetry when they have run out of things to say
• a lack of interest in technique, and a wish to hide devices
• a wish that poetry could transcend words, escaping from the page into the real world.
• a trend towards confessional poetry and the lyric

Edna Longley has said that every poem worth its salt is in part about poetry, but I see no harm in occasionally using poetry more blatantly as a subject, writing about what you know. Unlike "Custer" say, or a Biblical event, it's a subject with which an international readership might fairly be expected to be familiar (and be interested in). With so many styles, theories and schools of poetry around there is no shortage of subject matter. If nothing else, at least the poem might be educational.

The "anyone can write" tutors who tell pupils that they can write poetry about anything, anything at all, tend not to suggest that people write about poetry technique, though there's an increase in the amount of poetry about poetry workshops, and poetry about writing poetry (Ted Hughes' "The Thought Fox" for example).

In 2000 I produce 4 issues of Poetry about Poetry. I contributed Closure and started making a list of Poems about poetry.

Other resources

• Sonnets about sonnets
• www.poets.org
• Inner Chimes: Poems on Poetry, Bobbye S. Goldstein (ed), Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press, 1992.
• The introduction to Jim Murdoch's "Reader please supply meaning"

A summary of my views about poetry

Poetry

• Poetry is a wide genre - if someone tells me that they like Music I wouldn't know whether to play them Abba, Garage or Chopin. Even if they say they like Jazz, there's still a wide range. Similarly, the word "Poetry" is used to describe many types of text that (beyond the media used) have little in common. In particular their aesthetics may differ. A single poem can contain aspects of many of these subgenres, including prose genres.
• Poems can foreground typography (see Notation in poetry and music, Poetry punctuation, A theory of line-breaks), sound (see Choosing between sound and sense), discontinuity (see Juxtaposing text), spelling (see Strange Forms), shifts of tone and register (see Poetry, voice, and discourse analysis) or none of these (in which case if it's short it may well be described as prose - see Classifying - prose and cons). These features can interact with content and each other.
• I see few deep similarities (in particular regarding Truth) between poetry and maths/science (see Science and the Arts and Poetry, Mathematics, and Computing) but several with some other arts (see Art and narration and Art and poetry styles)
• The market affects the type of poetry written as well as published. In particular the fate of short texts has fluctuated over the years. See Adapting short texts for the market

Reading poetry

• Poetry appreciation is tainted by reputations and fashion, factors that are hard to disentangle from other, supposedly more literary features. Poetry is read by humans with different aesthetic profiles. Attention, Agility and Poetic Effects looks at the demands made on poetry readers.
• Poetry (like music but unlike a painting) is absorbed serially, patterns having to be built up by the reader. Ingarden and the Sense of Resolution considers what factors promote (or inhibit) this process.
• Novelty is attractive but relative. Readers who have not been exposed to loquacious people with mental problems, or to various avant-garde practices may not recognise how staid those methods are (though the poems may still be good). See Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation and Poetry, Madness and Cure
• Difficulty can be superficially attractive. See Difficulty and obscurity in poetry

Writing poetry

• Poetry writing is tainted by the desire to be liked, or read. It might be therapy. See The games poets play and Psychology, Psychiatry and Writers Groups.
• Intentionally or otherwise, the poet may use old devices on the reader (see Poeticisms, Charlatanism, Poetry and Art and The Great Poetry Hoax) or mask meaning from readers for dramatic effect, showmanship, or without realising that they're doing so (see Misdirection)

Poetry and Maps

In the past I've tried to compare map-making to writing poetry. In my poem The King it says

trying to preserve the angles, the shortest distances, the areas, but he can't have them all or even any 2

alluding to the idea that map-makers have tried several ways to represent the globe on a flat surface much as poets try to flatten experiences. In Obscurity (published in Sol) and especially New Pastorals - A Streetmap I went into more detail, pointing out that "Sometimes (as in maps of the Metro) connections may matter more than accurate distances and directions - they are spacialisations of time rather than depictions of space ... In tourist maps as in poems there's a balance between mimesis, knowledge and the formal requirements of the medium. Clarity of purpose doesn't imply stylistic monotony. Symbolism and Realism can be mixed, viewpoints can change (from plan to elevation, from absolute to personal), keys can be set up or recommended narratives and connections highlighted.". I ended the maps section rather grandly by writing "A poem is a map to assist in locating oneself in one's evolving world of language, as one slowly discovers a voice. Our poems increasingly have the gaudy colouring and po-mo stylistic variety of city maps."

My interest in this topic was rekindled on reading "Tears in the fence" (No 57 Summer 2013) where the ever-readable Andrew Duncan makes some worthwhile points about Fiona Sampson's Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry

• The idea of a map involves shared space. It places poets in relation to each other and must select technical features to be the dimensions of the map - its north and south. This must be very provocative to poets - who like to see themselves as autonomous and perfect, even if they habitually place everyone else in a shared space. Location at one, any, single point must irritate people who see themselves as present over whole areas where that spot is not. Poets like to think of the world as something that fits inside their poems, rather than vice versa (p.112)
• Sampson's faithfulness to individual texts is like travelling by candlelight, a terrain of handkerchief-sized plots, snug in low visibility. This is the opposite of a map that puts local patches together in one set of uniform relations. (p.114-5)

There's also "Language is not a vague province": Mapping and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, a fine dissertation by Alba Rebecca Newmann which goes much further than I ever could. She points out that

• Within literary criticism, the seductions of the terms associated with cartography — map, mapping, itinerary, travelogue, guide, discovery, exploration, power, representation — are palpable. ... Unfortunately, well-versed as we are with simile, analogy, and metaphor, it is almost too easy for literary critics and scholars to say "This maps X onto Y," or "This text is a map of that culture or that experience." The limitation of much of this literary scholarship is its failure to investigate how maps themselves operate — not only what they describe, but how they establish relationships and organize knowledge
• there are three cartographic ways of asserting authority or structuring knowledge that are particularly significant to the interdisciplinary study of maps and poems. These are: (1) maps articulate boundaries; (2) they delineate paths; and (3) they establish relationships.
• it is poetry’s ability to reveal unexpected proximities, (or distances) —conceptual, etymological, visual, aural — that is most significant to our conversation about poetic condensation as a cartographic practice. In the relatively small space of the page, the juxtaposition of words, lines, and images creates a field of associations.
• Understanding maps as artifacts, as rhetorical objects embedded in culture, does not allow our analysis of them to stop with a reading of their details or declarations. So, too, with poems. Once we have concentrated on what is on the page, we then must turn to talking about what is not on the page, and why: what circumstances, cultural or otherwise, may have contributed to the production of this utterance.

In her poetry classes she sometimes hands out maps for evaluation before giving the class poems. I hadn't thought of doing that. Sounds like fun.

Poetry competitions

Are poetry competitions worth the effort?

They can be. There's more than just luck involved - the same names turn up time after time in short-lists. Winning a big competition is good for your reputation (no favouritism involved) and can make non-poets take you seriously. Also there's money to be made - although there may be many entries, the majority are no-hopers giving their money away. Looking at it purely numerically, you've a better chance of winning a reasonable prize than being accepted by a reasonable magazine, and unlike magazine submissions there's a clear cut-off date after which you can send your poem elsewhere. Some competitions offer book publication as the prize - one of the few ways for new poets to get published nowadays.

Of course, luck is a factor -

• "When we were judging [The Booker] we tried three different voting systems and each time a different winner emerged", Rowan Pelling, the Observer, March 9, 2008
• When Stand ran a poetry competition in 1995 with 2 judges, the judges didn't agree with or respect each others opinion, so there were 2 lists of prizewinners.

Is there such a genre as "the competition poem"?

Some people say so.

• In Assent 65/2 D.A.Prince has a review of Robert Seatter's "Writing King Kong" in which she says "He's left behind much of the excitable display of virtuosity characterising his first collection, with its reassuring basketful of competition winners, and built on the strengths of his second book to produce a relatively quieter collection, more secure and confident. It's as though he no longer needs the morale-boosting success in competitions; he has reached his mature style, and has the assurance to trust his own instincts as to what works best in fitting these poems together".
• "A 'competition poem' is different. It has to stand on its own feet. It can have no relation to the poet’s other work because the judges don’t know who the poet is. The poet has to believe that this poem is worth thousands of pounds, and because of that the poem has to be not only well-crafted and original, it also has to be startling" (Kurt Heinzelman and Ian McMillan, 2009 Cardiff International Poetry Competition)

Judges are looking for excuses to reject poems so avoid obvious errors and obvious subject matter. Also have a strong start/end, don't be obscure and don't take too many risks - a great line won't in itself win a competition though a bad line will lose one. Poems with obvious technical skill seem to do quite well though they don't often win.

Matthew Sweeney in a judge's report wrote "We felt that the main prizewinners should touch on ... the big issues of death and love", but I don't think all competitions are judged like that. It's best to avoid hackneyed subjects. It might also be a good idea to avoid dealing with recent big events - too many other poets might have chosen the same topic.

Winning competitions can be like applying for a job. The first stage is more to do with avoiding errors in order to get in the short-list. The second stage is where depth is revealed. The poetry style's affected accordingly.

Who judges?

Sometimes a judge won't be famous for writing poetry - A.L.Kennedy has been a poetry judge, for example. Usually however, established mainstream poets judge. They're often full time writers or tutors, not necessarily knowledgeable about many types of poetry. But they've a keen eye for bad examples of the types of poetry they understand - bad poems might be rejected in 10 seconds. When there's more than one judge, don't expect a surprise winner.

If the entry form says "Final Judge: ..." (or even if it doesn't!) the named judge will only see a short-list of poems selected by people who are usually nameless.

Is it worth reading up on the judge(s)?

If you're going to send in something that's a little unusual it's worth knowing what sort of poetry the judges don't like (they may not appreciate L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, for example, however good it is). Don't assume however that they only like the sort of stuff they write.

When Wendy Cope judged the 2013 Bridport competition she wrote "Although I’m known for using traditional forms, I am not prejudiced against poems that don’t rhyme or scan, as long as they are good. If you do use a traditional form, you’ll need to get the metre right. Judging previous competitions, I’ve found that the most important quality is authenticity of voice – that is to say I’m put off if the poet seems to be using a special voice for poetry, rather than just being her/himself.". At least entrants would know where they stood after reading that.

Who wins?

Knowns and unknowns.

• Sam Gardiner had a poem rejected 5 times by magazines before it won the National Poetry Competition
• Jo Shapcott has won the National Poetry Competition twice!

In the US there's a problem with judges selecting the work of [ex]students (even in anonymous competitions). Some competitions over there now stipulate that related students can't win. I wonder how much this has happened in the UK?

Who gets the profits?

Sometimes a writers group, a charity, or a magazine. Sometimes there are no profits - the competition is sponsored or funded by an endowment. But do think about where the money goes.

Which competitions should I enter?

See the lists produced by the National Poetry Library - http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/competitions/. Beware of covert exploitation - a £1 entry fee deserves a £100 first prize, a £3 entry fee deserves at least a £500 first prize. And if the judges aren't named, don't bother entering. Here are some of the bigger UK competitions -

• June - The Bridport Prize (£5000 1st prize)
• October - the Poetry Business competition (£1000 of prizes + publication for a booklet), the Poetry Society competition (£5000 1st prize, about 6000 entries)
• December - The Cardiff Poetry Competition (£5000 of prizes)

See also

• Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus (Peter Riley)
• Helena Nelson's write-up of how she judged
• Blowing on the Dice: On Competition Mentality(Kirsten Irving)

Repetition in Jon Stone's "School of Forgery"

Jon Stone frequently uses repetition - within and between his poems. His poems also repeat phrases from other sources. Repetition's a technique I rarely use, so I thought I'd use his School of Forgery book to examine the effect.

Repetition

According to Tannen, "Repetition ... is the central linguistic meaning-making strategy, a limitless resource for individual creativity and interpersonal involvement" ("Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse", CUP, 1989). Various technical terms are described on the Wikipedia page on rhetorical repetition (Anaphora - repetition at the start of lines, Epistrophe - repetition at the end of each clause, etc). The list of effects below comes from Al Filreis' Repetition page and elsewhere.

• Sound/ritual - "Primitive religious chants from all cultures show repetition developing into cadence and song" (Filreis)
• Providing structure - "a refrain, which serves to set off or divide narrative into segments, as in ballads, or, in lyric poetry, to indicate shifts or developments of emotion. Such repetitions may serve as commentary, a static point against which the rest of the poem develops, or it may be simply a pleasing sound pattern to fill out a form." (Filreis)
• Unifying - "As a unifying device, independent of conventional metrics, repetition is found extensively in free verse, where parallelism (repetition of a grammar pattern) reinforced by the recurrence of actual words and phrases governs the rhythm which helps to distinguish free verse from prose" (Filreis)
• Emphasis of the succeeding phrase - "Sometimes the effect of a repeated phrase in a poem will be to emphasize a development or change by means of the contrast in the words following the identical phrases" (Filreis)
• Indicating closure - the final line being a repetition of the first or penultimate line
• Generating expectation - which can lead to surprize
• Backtracking - an indication that a path of enquiry has ended (failed), that one has to go back and try again
• Habitualisation - In "Flesh and Blood Repetition and Obscurity in Gothic Poetry" (Sara Deniz Akant, Wesleyan University) it's suggested that a way of making the strange familiar is to repeat it - "poetic repetition does not aim to provide the reader with a resolving grasp on something that is obscure, but rather to make its inherent obscurity a continual source of his pleasure."
• Sheer pleasure - In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Freud wrote that "repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure."
• Emphasising the significance of context over content - Because of context, the 2nd occurrence of a phrase won't have the same meaning as the 1st (in villanelles but also with "and miles to go before I sleep")
• Contrasting with change - In "Nietzsche and Philosophy", Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between Platonic repetition (which effects semblance and strives towards unity) and Nietzschean repetition (emphasizing divergence and difference). Repetition is part of the "same/different" binary that drives narrative. Narrative stands between repetition (where the text is the same) and random juxtaposition (where there's no repetition). Narrative keeps some things the same (the context, the characters, etc) while changing something else. The longer the sequence where the division between mutable and non-mutable remains stable, the more likely the sequence will be considered as narrative - foreground against background.

Monet and Warhol are amongst the artists who have produced series of similar works. Monet's paintings of haystacks and Rouen cathedral emphasise the differences. Warhol's repetitions sometimes dilute the image's meaning.

There are attendant risks. As with many rhetorical devices (but especially those used by preachers and politicians) repetition can evoke distrust in readers. Beginners use much repetition - once end-rhyme is rejected it's one of the easier ways to sound poetic, to carry on when you've run out of things to say. It might be merely verbose, unnecessary - first-draft scaffolding. It's used by people who used to write short poems but now want to write longer ones - each repetition is like a new start. It can give fragments spurious unity - the repeated pegs on a clothes line of imagery. It's a way to induce trance. It can degenerate into sing-song echolalia. Or it can be plain boring.

Users

In Lexical Repetition in American Poetry Alan H Pope points out that repetition is commonly used. In "Ariel", Plath uses reiteration in 23 of the 40 poems. In Stevens' "Harmonium" at least 26 poems use repetition (6 begin and end with the same line/stanza). Stevens' longer poems (and some of Eliot's) repeat a central argument or statement (each time with perhaps a different, more complete understanding). Poets with oratory styles - Ginsburg in "Howl" for example - exploit repetition.

Helen Dunmore's Glad of these times uses it. "The Art of Falling" by Kim Moore (Seren, 2015) has much too. For example, the first 7 couplets "In That Year" begin with "And in that year". The 8th and final couplet is "And then that year lay down like a path/ and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it". It's also used by less mainstream poets - see for example "We needed coffee but ..." by Matthew Welton (Carcanet, 2009)

School of Forgery

Jon Stone's book doesn't include standard forms where there's word repetition (sestina, villanelle), so the expectation/surprise aspect is missing. He doesn't seem to be a theory-purist - word-repetition is used in many different situations.

• "Dojinshiworld" is 7 xaxa stanzas, 4 of them beginning with "We came to".
• "The Mark" is in couplets, the line-endings being "emotion's/emotion", "absence/absence)", "hoodwink/something", "hiding/emotion", "something/emotion".
• Each line of "Mustard" ends with an anagram of mustard.
• Successive stanzas of "Send in the Mink" begin "Send in the mink", "Send in the savage mink", "Send in the unsuitable mink"
• The "Near Extremes" poems on p.3, 13, 20, and 29 are related by repetition - the first line of each is "Where I came from it's the other way round". They all have 2 5-lined stanzas
• The "Swallow" poems on p.12, 19, 28, and 35 all have on their first lines "know of nothing beyond the". They all have 5 3-lined stanzas.
• "The Year Long Dress Rehearsal" and "All Year Dress Rehearsal" have similar first lines - "I'm going to be mad - my first major role" and "I'm going to be sorrowful - my first big part"
• 4 of the 5 pairs of lines in "III. Hurricane Polymar" are of the form "With a *** ***, Detective Takeshi,/ you become a futuristic ***."
• 4 of the 7 lines in "Far Dancing and ..." (part II) begin "I cure her,"
• 4 consecutive lines of "The Laughing Body" begin "They want to drink breast"
• In "Second-Hand Kite Feathers" (part II) the 1st line of all 10 aabxb stanzas is "Very highly recommended"
• In "Adcock Modulations" each part has 2 stanzas of 4 lines. The 1st stanza begins with "They" and the 2nd with "But s/he"
• All 7 shaped poems begin with "in which"
• On p.72 is a shape poem where John Steed's umbrella is created from 11 repetitions of the word "to".
• "The Year Long Dress Rehearsal" has 4 consecutive lines of the form "Your ... kill(s) me" and 3 consecutive lines that begin with "That ticking which is my". There's more (incidental?) patterned repetition - line 1 from the top and bottom both end with the word "role". Line 3 from the top and bottom both have the word "lines".

The layouts are standard. They use black text, one font-face, little italics, no bulletmarks, only 1 gap in a line (p.46) and no indentation (except for p.44-45 which has continuation lines, and the shape poems), so the words have to do extra work. The following shows some options that can be used when there's parallelism. I think Jon Stone prefers the form in the first column/row.

I love you for the way you never doubt me. I love you for a hundred thousand reasons.	I love you for the way you never doubt me. I love you for a hundred thousand reasons.
I love you for 1) the way you never doubt me; 2) a hundred thousand reasons.	I love you for the way you never doubt me a hundred thousand reasons

It's presumably not coincidence that 3 of the "Swallow" poems immediately precede "Near Extremes" poems, and that one of each sequence is unattached, but I can't see the purpose. Anyway, why weren't the "Swallow" poems put together, making them stanzas of a single poem, or a series of variations? It's done elsewhere in the book.

At times repetition helps hold these poems together (when there's little else that does). The repetition is never percussive, never has a [mock-] Churchillian charge. It helps provide structure, and may perform habitualisation. In pieces like "Second-Hand Kite Feathers" there may be a Warholian effect. Sometimes it helps emphasise the succeeding phrases, but in poems like "III. Hurricane Polymar" I don't get it at all.

As an experiment one could try removing repetition from some of these poems and adding repetition to some poems that currently lack it. These, and the originals, could then be tried out on new readers.

Al Filreis points out that "Allusion or quoting is a special case of repetition". Jon Stone uses that case too.

Fancy and Imagination

This is an old topic, one that's popular for essays. Coleridge introduced the distinction to help explain why he thought Milton was better than Cowley, and why Wordsworth was good. My interest in it has been revived by reading "The Further Reach", an article by Maitreyabandhu in Poetry Review, 101:3, Autumn 2011. He says that imagination

• "is a faculty that unites and transcends reason and emotion and points us toward a deeper understanding of life beyond the limitations of the rational", p.59
• "spontaneously selects sights, sounds, thoughts, images and so forth, and organises them into pleasurable formal relations that draw their deeper significance, expressing fundamental truths beyond the machinery of conceptual thought", p.61
• "unifies the contents of experience by discovering something within them, some underlying meaning or significance, inaccessible to ordinary consciousness", p.64
• "unifies the poet - better still imagination is the unified consciousness of the poem", p.64
• "is the mind functioning at its most integrated and penetrating. It is the entirety of the person - reason, emotion, volition and sensation - blended into complete action", p.65

In contrast, Fancy is "novelty for novelty's sake", p.61. He offers Hughes' "The Thought Fox" as an example of Imagination, something that absorbs the "strange yet familiar". He doesn't name any Fanciers. More examples would help. Here's one: A winged horse introduces a new concept into our minds, a new entity that we might almost believe could exist somewhere. That's Imagination - it puts 2 and 2 together to make 5. Contrastingly, in labs they've grafted a human ear onto the back of a rat. That's Fancy. I'd guess that the Martian and Metaphysical poets get accused of being Fancy too.

When one wants to separate two similar terms, it's tempting to associate some features you like with one of the terms. Here the ideas of non-rationality, unity, and deep/fundamental truths are aspects of Imagination. Not everyone considers these features positive ones, and there's even less agreement when people have to decide whether any particular piece exhibits Fancy or Imagination. These features seem commonly bunched though, and not just under the banner of Romanticism. For example, in ARTEMISpoetry, Issue 7 (Nov 2011) M.R.Peacocke writes (p.22) that

• "my poems ... come from myself: I mean my true and inward self. The question at any moment is to what extent the self is true or how far it is behaving according to modifications or manipulations."
• "I believe that my rather formal upbringing and a rigid kind of academic education modified and manipulated me to a considerable extent; but that I am gradually finding the voice of the original creature. She preserved herself when young by spending a lot of time on her own, and in interacting without instruction with other creatures - animals and plants"
• "I do not understand very much about this process of discovering meaning, but I know it is not achieved by means of the intellect"
• "The imagination, which I take to recognise similarities and connections and therefore to create metaphor, plays a major part in the making of a poem"

Imagination, poetry and selfhood become interrelated.

The Self and the Poem

In "Biographia Literaria", Coleridge wrote that "The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM". He also wrote that a poem must be a cohesive unit, with every part working together to build into a whole. As Sana Shahid points out, "The significance of the Imagination for Coleridge was that it represented the sole faculty within man that was able to achieve the romantic ambition of reuniting the subject and the object; the world of the self and the world of nature". Imagination is the faculty that incorporates alien matter and experiences into new wholes.

This terminology is tied up with self-discovery and the notion of the self as a unified whole (or at least a unified core, a soul, surrounded by socially-conditioned contingencies). The Romantic preoccupation with individualism and the Self (against or with Nature) coupled with the demotion of language helps enforce the idea of the integrity of the Self, outcomes being the lyric and poets' striving to find their "voice". The two beliefs (in self-integrity and aesthetic wholeness) might be related.

Transcendence

Transcendence is the means of escape, of growth. Surrealist juxtaposition seems a useful tool of the Imagination, bypassing Reason - "In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", ("Statutes of Liberty", Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74). Surrealism is also an easily used generator of Fancy. Is Comte de Lautréamont's "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" Fancy or Imagination? Like beauty, I suppose it's in the eye of the beholder.

Symbolists also strived to bypass habitual thought patterns, to "purify language of base, commercial, and everyday meanings, an alchemical principle of the transubstantiation of matter designed to elevate poetry to the condition of music", Anthony Mellors, "Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.3-4

Maitreyabandhu writes about something grander that transcends more than reason and language. It "completely transcends our usual self-consciousness ... We cannot but experience it as coming from beyond the self".

Now

Maitreyabandhu writes "Modern western culture has mostly lost touch with the depth and importance of imagination; it's just another part of the entertainment industry. At the same time 'imagination' can also be used to glorify the irrational or as another weapon in the war against reasoned thought" (p.59). I don't think we've lost touch. It's more that the goal posts have moved. In Romanticism the Self comes face to face with the world. In this relationship

• Language is an impediment. The more transparent it is the better
• Society is a hindrance. The true self becomes obscured by accretions of habit and social conditioning

Fancy is mechanical, non-transcendental, industrial. Imagination shows that there is a world beyond, bypassing language and reason. By unpeeling layers, the true self can be revealed, tempted by the exotic, the beyond.

We still care about the concepts involved with the discussion of Fancy and Imagination even if we don't use those terms. What's changed are the values we associate with the concepts, and the reader/writer relationship that the appreciation of these values engender. Hype, commercialisation and the sheer volume of juxtapositions have made us wary of mere novelty. Google can churn out connections to order. Improved communications makes the search fast and easy. In an age where Ultimate Truths are few, we still seek out the Radically New, the latest discovery. Increasingly, "new" means "new combinations of old material/genres" or an emergent phenomenon resulting from a "more is different" philosophy. Has Imagination moved with the times?

• We moved from "Language is an impediment" to "Language is a tool", then to distrust language, treating language as a subject. Stephen Burt suggested that if you're like Armantrout you come to "realize (emotionally) what you might have known (intellectually) all along: these see-through dialects of fraud and bad faith, these corruptible, companionable, always-already-commercial phraseologies, are all these is ... there is no authentic alternative, no uncorrupted language reserved for true sentiment"
• The notion of a true self sullied by society has been weakened by the realisation that even basics like vision require timely stimulation during one's developmental phase otherwise they're permanently impaired. Personality is fragmented, a toolbox of coping mechanisms that are combined to suit the situation. Peeling away "layers" merely impoverishes one's resources, restricting one's range of behaviours. One claimant to the role of true-self is the behaviour informed by long-term-memory - if that region of the brain is damaged, you're "not yourself" any more. But many other types of brain damage change a person. Unity is another layer of socialisation to be peeled away.
• The need for unity in a work of art has come under scrutiny - see Literary order and chaos for more about literary wholeness, the Aristotlean notion that in a masterpiece everything contributes to the whole. Unity is no longer an artistic necessity, nor is it in some way a reflection of persona integrity - it's not considered psychologically realistic.

When the poet's worldview is language or at least deeply mediated by language, the poems that the poets write might reflect this viewpoint and will no longer be a whole. We've moved from Eliot's fragments held together by a single spiritual vision of the age to Auden's varieties of quotable wisdom and then to Berryman ("When he found his voice [Berryman] found his voices" wrote Louise Gluck). Whereas in the past poets came to understand themselves by their relationship to Nature, now the focus has changed to concentrate on living in language.

We still like believable characters and self-sustaining worlds even if we know they're not "real" (Harry Potter and "Lord of the Rings" are considered sustained feats of imagination), though we're less likely nowadays to suggest that "time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea" transcends anything. Some examples of Fancy works better than others, but the distinction between Fancy and Imagination has become untenable. The reality of the quantum world described in mathematical equations "transcends" appearances, showing us a "deeper reality", making possible MRI scanning which in turn gives us insights into how brains work and how minds operate. It doesn't bypass rationalism, but that seems a small price to pay for learning more about the Self and Nature. Language (other than the language of mathematics) doesn't get much of a look-in so neither does poetry.

Difficulty and obscurity in poetry

In their day Browning and Dylan Thomas were considered notoriously obscure. Poets more recently associated with obscurity include Geoffrey Hill and Prynne. Except for their supposed obscurity these poets have little in common, and according to their proponents, their poetry may merely be difficult rather than obscure. This article covers some issues arising from the terms "difficulty" and "obscurity", looking at how the terms are used by theorists and readers.

In documentation the terms "difficulty" and "obscurity" are often conflated even if initially distinctions are drawn. Let's first consider some common usages of the concept of "obscurity" because they influence the meaning of the literary term.

• If the moon is obscured by clouds, both the cause of the obscurity and the solution to it (i.e. waiting) are known
• An obscure fact, or mentions of someone who "fades into obscurity", are hard to find

These usages suggest an obstruction between the object and the observer. There might not be difficulty, complexity or anything unknown. The obscurity isn't considered intrinsic to the work. In general, "obscure" is more derogatory than "difficult". "obscure", unlike "difficult" is a verb as well as an adjective, it's something you can do to a work (and hence potentially undo). It's more likely to be the author's "fault". Problems of perception and communication are more likely to provoke cries of "obscurity" than "difficulty". As William Empson said, "with obscurity ... lack of clarity occurs at the semantic level itself. ... Obscurity is, therefore, different from ambiguity [where there are distinct, disparate but clear meanings], but it can provide the latitude for ambiguity to occur in."

Obscurity is often thought of as unnecessary difficulty, the opposite of "clarity".

• "All obscure poetry is difficult, but ... not all difficult poetry is obscure. Obscurity is a lack of clarity; it is a flaw....[it] is always a defect" (Shepherd)
• "Difficulty can be either positive or negative depending on the context in, and the circumstances under which it finds articulation. Obscurity, on the contrary, is almost always negative signifying a failure on the part of the poet due to a complex of variables ranging from incompetence to showiness" (Prof Wimal Dissanayake)
• "An author is obscure when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, inappropriate, or involved" (Coleridge)

A work is difficult when when the reader/viewer feels they don't understand it. This may be because it's obscure. There's often an assumption that a difficult text won't be immediately understood. If it is, the work is more likely to be considered deep or multilayered. The opposite of "difficult" is "accessible", though a difficult piece may be initially accessible if it makes sense a sentence at a time. Such pieces are often described as "deceptively simple" (i.e. not as simple as they look). In contrast, an obscure poem might only be superficially difficult.

The reader's tolerance to difficulty depends on the theory of understanding they adopt. A maths proof, an essay by Heidegger or a Stockhausen symphony assume different modes of comprehension. A single poem can require the use of all of these modes and each mode has its associated brand of difficulty. In some texts (maths, for example), obscurity is unacceptable and difficulty is tolerated - even expected. In contrast, when listening to a melody, obscurity is not an issue. Some poetry readers think that obscurity is unacceptable. Others don't see it as a property to assess the success of a poem by.

The procedures used to impart understanding also affect the reception of "difficult" texts. Should one throw readers (learners) in the deep end, hoping for sudden insight, or should one teach stage by stage? The "sudden insight" approach may exploit obscurity to add an element of surprise.

Defining Difficulty

On Poets Org it says "The taxonomy of difficulty is as vast as the available poetic instances ... There is the difficulty of syntax, reference, image, idea, and metaphysical reach and of course the difficulty inherent in that which is to be expressed."

In "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner identified 4 categories of difficulty

• Contingent - solvable by work.
• Modal - blindspots, category difficulties ("it's not poetry"), reader limitations.
• Tactical - "source in the writer's will or in the failure of adequacy between his intention and his performative means". "We are not meant to understand easily and quickly". "'Contingently' and 'modally' Wallace Stevens's 'Anecdote of the Jar' is transparent [it has a clear message - ] however simple, the work of art sets ordinance upon the surrounding chaos of the organic [but]" It is the last two lines that obstruct and unsettle ... This rich undecidability is exactly what the poet aims at. It can be made a hollow trick (as it often is with the syntactic instabilities in Dylan Thomas)"
• Ontological - breaks the poet/reader contract. "At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all"

In Obscurity and Dylan Thomas's early poetry there's a more thorough attempt at defining difficulty - "A poem is considered difficult if the representation constructed by the reader is defective. Such defective representation is produced when part or all of the potential obstacles in the text, intentional or unintentional, become effective obstacles in the domains of language and/or coherence and/or the world referred to. This means that they disrupt construction of the representation."

The norms being disrupted can be of various types

• Standard methods of comprehension - "Models of comprehension by van-Dijk and Kintsch, 1983, Kintsch and van-Dijk, 1978, Sanford and Garrod, 1981, Johnson-Laird, 1983) as well as on Miller and Kintsch's study on readability, (1980)"
• Plain language - "The studies of Steiner (1978) , Nowottny ((1962)1984) and Press (1963) do attempt to come to terms with poetic difficulty as such. The same holds true for Fois-Kaschel (2002) ... These scholars proposed, each in their own way, accounts of textual factors capable of producing difficulty: neologisms, allusions, figures etc."
• Plain concepts - "Another approach to difficulty is provided by Riffaterre; his description of difficulty is founded on the notion of the matrix, a minimal unity which constitutes the essence of the poem and which is a generator of senses. The poem's significance is produced by the detour the text makes as it runs the gauntlet of mimesis (1984, 19). Difficulties are produced when the matrix is repressed (ibid). The more it is repressed (i.e., implicit) the greater will be the deviation from literal sense."
• Relevance -"An obscure poem departs from the dynamic that is established between the three components of the act of communication - originator, message and recipient. In a normal act of communication, the originator, aiming at rapid transmission of the message, constructs it in such a way that the recipient needs to make the minimum effort (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). The obscure poem will make radical changes to this relationship."

People have tried to distiguish obscurity from difficulty

• In After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America Shetley distinguishes difficulty from "obscurity," which he defines as those "elements of language that resist easy semantic processing. ... he uses "difficulty" to refer to both the obscurity of a text and an audience's grappling with it. Shetley expands his theoretical basis to include a discussion of "lucidity," and "lyricism." He borrows these terms from Charles Altieri and uses them to define the split between English and Creative Writing departments. English departments practice lucidity, an enterprise in which theorists draw upon reason to examine (skeptically) or to "demystify" the "subjective, emotive value-laden discourse" of poetry".
• On Arduity it says "J H Prynne ... has recently made the following distinction between difficulty and obscurity: When poetry is obscure this is chiefly because information necessary for comprehension is not part of the reader's knowledge. ... finding out this information may dispel much of the obscurity. When poetry is difficult this is more likely because the language and structure of its presentation are unusually cross-linked or fragmented, or dense with ideas and response-patterns that challenge the reader's powers of recognition. In such cases extra information may not give much help.
  Both Geoffrey Hill and Prynne combine obscurity and difficulty but they do so in different ways, Hill refers to obscure things (which can be looked up) but his use of language and sturcture are fairly straightforward. Prynne gives much more emphasis to cross-linking and fragmentation but also makes use of obscure references, he also makes this doubly difficult by not marking quotations as quotations so the reader is led further astray."

The Purpose of Difficulty and Obscurity

Poetry seems especially partial to difficulty and obscurity

• "In poetry, unlike in other forms of discourse, obscurity might be an aesthetic principle; indeed, poetic discourse enjoys a special privilege: it may run counter to the fundamental requirement of language, namely communicability, and may infringe some of the basic rules of language. ... It is able to depart from the requirements of coherence, cohesion and consistency with ideas expressed in the text, or indeed with external knowledge. It does not establish any information known both to the originator and to the recipient that would ensure a grasp of the information that follows (see Clark and Clark, 1977). It will frequently depart from the literal sense of the words that it uses and endow them with new meanings. And despite all this, simply because it is a poem, it will be perceived as a significant text." (Iris Yaron-Leconte)
• "For the person who reads a poem, obscurity is one of the elements that create 'magic'. Unlike in the case of non-poetic obscure texts, the fact that understanding is deferred is part of the aesthetics of obscurity and this in itself is thus linked to the experience that the poet seeks to create for the reader." (Iris Yaron-Leconte)
• On "The Meaning of Obscurity" it says "it is quite obvious that if the good poems of our times are stripped of their difficulty - if they are made reader friendly - they would simply lose their relevance as poems at all. To communicate clearly, they need to sustain their obscurity. Obviously we aren't talking about the obscurity born out of lack of knowledge, craft, experience or sensibility but about an obscurity that is painstakingly interwoven with meaning to create a tapestry of overwhelming intricacy."
• "At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment", Breton
• Difficulty can be used as a change of texture, to control reading speed
• Difficulty may be the result of Mimesis, a consequence of difficult content ("One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?" - Geoffrey Hill)
• Difficulty may be the result of characters having complex thought or wanting to hide something.

Examples

It might help to have some examples to refer to

1. "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", Comte de Lautréamont
2. "When once the twilight locks no longer/Locked in the long worm of my finger/Nor dammed the sea that sped about my fist,/ The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,/ The milky acid on each hinge", Dylan Thomas
3. Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII
4. "The sole was amazing"
5. Hearing "sun" you might think "son" was said. Reading a poorly scribbled "sun" you might read it as "son". If it was written as son you might have trouble reading it at all.

Are these examples difficult or obscure? If you think them obscure it's worth asking WHAT is being obscured? Some readers, when they can't say what the poem's about, say that the meaning they're looking for is obscured. By "meaning" they often mean "moral" or "paraphrase", or even the real-world situation that's supposedly being represented. How might one respond to these examples?

1. Would this be less obscure were it known that the author's mother was a seamstress and his father was a surgeon? To celebrate his father's first job, his father's mother gave him an umbrella which he used all his life.
   None of this is true as far as I know, but a back-story like this would comfort many readers.
2. Are the locks made of hair, do they need a key, or are they locks on a canal? There's ambiguity but is there difficulty? In Obscurity and Dylan Thomas's early poetry there's more discussion about this example
3. This is a minimalist work (a 2 by 6 by 10 pile of 120 bricks) that attracted media attention when it was exhibited in the Tate at London. 'The sensation of these pieces was that they come above your ankles, as if you were wading in bricks', Andre has commented. 'It was like stepping from water of one depth to water of another depth.' Can a minimalist work be obscure or difficult? Can it be complex? Maybe - "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.vi
4. Suppose the author of this replied "I was in holiday in Italy recently, and it was really hot so I thought I'd use the Italian word for sun in this line." If you then replied "But there's no clue that you're talking about the sun. You didn't even put the word in italics. I thought you were writing about a restaurant meal." has the author any defence?
5. These examples (handwriting that's "difficult to read", etc) illustrate when signal noise causing a communication problem. Difficulty for which the reader sees no purpose tends to be described as obscurity.

Resolving Difficulty

Not so long ago it was considered inappropriate to assume knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible. Nowadays we're more tolerant of difficulty - the onus is again on the reader to work harder because

• It's assumed that Google can resolve allusions
• Language Poetry (and post-avant/elliptical poetry) has made readers more familiar with radical disruption
• Reverence for the canon has been replaced by a new hierarchy of institutionalised respect (as much for the living as the dead) within the Creative Writing discipline

Once you know how you extract meaning from a text you're in a position to deduce what you might find "difficult" and whether the term "obscure" has a distinct meaning. Your method of extraction depends on the type of text and the social situation, as does the need to attribute blame and decide how much effort to expend. You may admit ignorance or accuse the Emperor of wearing new clothes. You may need to give yourself an excuse for not spending time analysing the piece.

A difficult piece may be presented as a challenge. A riddle asks the reader to guess the subject. A puzzle may require a further key to unlock the piece (and perhaps reveal further secrets). With both the riddle and the puzzle the reader is likely to know when they've "got it".

A work may require the reader to pass through various stages before reaching the destination. In a whodunit for example, readers follow the plot. This trajectory can be thwarted by

• making the journey circular - Finnegans Wake's "riverrun"; Harry Potter's new generation meeting at the station in the final pages; a framed story which in turn frames the first story. "And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time" (Little Gidding. Eliot)
• making the journey hard - Gaps can be left. There may be no intermediate confirmation of hypotheses. "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important" - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
• having nothing at the end. In this case the end-orientated journey produces no result, no product. The journey was about process. Pilgrimage has become exile. "And what you thought you came for/Is only a shell, a husk of meaning/From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled/If at all" (Little Gidding. Eliot)

Even if the journey (the unwrapping, the analysis) leads to a conclusion, one never knows for sure whether one's arrived. Whether the work is difficult or obscure, the end of the journey may be a single event or moral, or at its centre there may be an unresolvable juxtaposition of 2 or more items. Perhaps every piece of art must eventually be mysterious or irreducable, so rather than bury this mystery, it might as well be placed on the surface. A typical Magritte painting is an example of the mystery being easy to see. Everything is presented. It cannot be further reduced. "We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other", Wittgenstein, (Philosophical Investigations, No.531). If you're prepared to understand Magritte you might accept the Comte de Lautréamont quote too, and may in time become sympathetic to Dylan Thomas's offering.

References

• "The Chequered Shade: Reflections on Obscurity in Poetry", John Press, London: Oxford University Press, 1963
• "What Is a Difficult Poem?: Towards a Definition", Iris Yaron-Leconte, Journal of Literary Semantics 37(2) (2008): 129-150.
• "The Processing of Obscure Poetic Texts: Mechanisms of Selection", Iris Yaron-Leconte, Journal of Literary Semantics 31 (2002): 133-170.
• "Mechanisms of Combination in the Processing of Obscure Poems", Iris Yaron-Leconte, Journal of Literary Semantics 32 (2003): 151-166.
• "The Uses of Obscurity", Allon White, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
• "Obscurity in Poetry — A Spectrum" by Geoff Page (from "Southerly")

Fractals and Poetry

"Fractals may be the most complex and the most subtle examples of patterns found in both mathematics and poetry ... When poets borrowed ideas from fractal geometry and applied them to the reading and writing of poetry, they made a remarkable intellectual leap" (M. Birken and A.C.Coon, "Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry", Rodopi, 2008, p.167).

So what are fractals? I only have a rough idea. Symmetry is when you can do something to a shape so that it matches itself - with rotational symmetry you rotate the shape; with reflection symmetry you reflect the shape. You can look upon fractals as another type of symmetry where instead of rotating or reflecting, you magnify. In real life you can get a rough idea of how this works by looking at a tree (the pattern of the boughs is like the pattern of twigs when you zoom in) or a coastline (the jaggedness of a coastline is similar whether you're looking at a satellite image or through a microscope) but pure fractals only exist in maths - it doesn't matter at what scale you look at certain mathematical objects, they'll always look the same.

It's unclear how this idea can apply to poetry, and in fact people seem to merge the fractal concept with ideas from complexity theory - "strange attractors", etc. The resulting poetry has been described using other, non-mathematical theories too, so the whole area's fraught with potential confusion. Whatever terms they use ("fractal" - Alice Fulton; "radical artifice" - Perloff) there seems to be fair agreement about the sort of poetry under discussion. Fulton's written extensively about it. Here are some quotes from Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions (Alice Fulton, Thumbscrew No 12 - Winter 1998/9

• "During the last quarter of the twentieth century, science has turned away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more chaotic phenomena. Rather than being divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern and repetition that signal structure."
• "Just as fractal science analysed the ground between chaos and Euclidean order, fractal poetics could explore the field between gibberish and traditional forms. "
• "Over the past decade, scientists have come to view fractals as particular instances within the larger field of complexity theory. While retaining the term "fractal poetry", I hope to suggest ways in which complexity theory might amplify the possibilities of such a poetics. (A poem is not a complex adaptive system: the comparison is analogical, not literal.)"
• "My tentative 1986 prospectus for post modern fractal poetry suggested that digression, interruption, fragmentation, and lack of continuity be regarded as formal functions rather than lapses into formlessness and that all shifts of rhythm be equally probable."
• "On the ground between set forms and aimlessness a poem can be spontaneous and adaptive – free to think on its feet rather than fulfil a predetermined scheme. In a departure from Romantic ideals, fractal aesthetics suppose that "spontaneous" effects can be achieved through calculated as well as ad libitum means. Thus "spontaneity" does not refer to a method of composition but to linguistic gestures that feel improvisatory to the reader. Rifting and jamming, rough edge and raw silk – such wet-paint effects take the form of long asides, discursive meanderings, and sudden shifts in diction or tone. "
• "Complex adaptive systems do not seek equilibrium or try to establish balance; they exist in unfolding and "never get there". As Holland says, "the space of possibilities is too vast; they have no practical way of finding the optimum." Like complex systems, fractal poetry exists within a vast array of potentialities: it is a maximalist aesthetic."
• "Diction, surface textures, irregular metres, shifts of genre, and tonal variations take centre stage as defining formal elements. Function words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions) assume schematic importance."
• " The poem plane is analogous to the picture plane in painting: a two-dimensional surface that can convey the illusion of spatial depth. Painters use perspective, colours, texture, and modelling to suggest three dimensions on the flat canvas. If objects are painted progressively smaller and closer together they will seem to recede. Space also can be suggested by juxtaposing oncoming warm colours with introverted cool ones. By alternating thickly-textured impasto with turpentine-thinned washes, the artist can create opaque areas of positive space and radiant glazes of negative space. Objects of the same scale can be modelled differently to create depth: a hard-edged rendering will appear nearer than a hazy one."
• "Just as paint fosters illusions of proximity and distance on canvas, words can suggest spatial depth on paper. A fractal poem can do this by shifting its linguistic densities: the poem’s transparent, easy passages impart the sensation of negative space; they vanish into meaning when read rather than calling attention to their linguistic presence. More textured language, on the other hand, refuses to yield its mass immediately. The eye rests on top of the words, trying to gain access but is continually rebuffed. Such (relatively) opaque sections assume the solidity of positive space. By juxtaposing transparent with textured passages, fractal poetry constructs a linguistic screen that alternately dissolves and clouds."
• "Rather than excise stale portmanteaus, fractal poetry might use empty rhetoric sardonically, as a means of splintering the "sincere" voice that was a modernist value. Abstractions are arguably the most rarified words because they have no relation to a specific physical object. In fractal poetics, abstractions are not forsworn as redundant explications of self-sufficient concrete symbols; rather the abstract becomes a valuable realm in itself"
• "Fractal poetry likewise makes use of recurring cluster words, limbic lines, or canopy stanzas as a means of creating depth. (Cluster being an aggregation of stars with common properties; limbic connoting emotion and motivation; canopy casting a shade overall.) Unlike the villanelle or sestina’s recycling, fractal repetition does not appear at a predetermined place within a set scheme. The poem is more dynamic and turbulent because its repetitions have an element of ambush"
• "As free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse breaks the poem plane"

Many of these effects have been studied without recourse to complexity theory - they're what 20th century poetry (especially any erstwhile avant-garde works) use. Does this treatment offer any advantages over a more literary one? As Fulton says, it's only an analogy. The work of Jackson Pollock has been analysed to derive its fractal dimension, and experiments suggest that humans prefer fractal images with a dimensionality in the 1.3-1.5 range irrespective of whether the images are from maths, art or nature. I don't think similar work's been done with poetry, though I suspect "The Wasteland" is susceptible to such treatment.

For the moment I think I'll stick with the more literary descriptions, though the idea of measuring the different types of order appeals to me, as does the idea that some effects needn't be used as regularly or uniformly as they often are.

Factoids

Well, that's what I'll call them - facts (sometimes contextless and isolated) that are put into poems. They can be interesting in their own right - strange but true. They can be a piece of information everyone's expected to know (e.g. "London's the biggest city in England"), the reader thus expected to ponder on the implications (easiest city to be lonely in?). They can be a minor piece of knowledge shared by reader and poet, perhaps a piece of public knowledge that had a particular significance to the poet. As an example of their usage, here's the first and the final stanza from "Then in the twentieth century" which won 2nd Prize in the 2002 National Poetry Competition. It's by David Hart.

Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape, the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move, and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges. ... Men quarrelled about scrolls found in pots near the Dead Sea, the library at Norwich burned down, milk was pasteurised by law, I have four children, all adult now, small islands became uninhabited, Harpo never spoke on film.

Most of these factoids seem to lack any special significance to the persona, nor do they seem closely inter-related. There's not really any narrative either. There's some theoretical justification for this approach. Facts help to anchor the poem to the verifiable world, and are never really isolated.

• "although it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the representation of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the second with having previously reached the first", Ruskin, "Modern Painters"
• "Structuralism ... starts off from the observation that every concept in a given system is determined by all other concepts of the system and has no significance by itself alone ... there is an interrelation between the data (facts) and the philosophical assumptions, not a unilateral dependence", Garvin, "a Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style"

Supposed facts may be loaded with implicit assumptions. There's psychological justification too - after all, what we remember isn't just the personal, or the personal responses to public events, we also remember public events much as many others might.

Some poets never use this approach - it's non-lyrical; just dead facts; a collage that depends on juxtaposition; an essay. I like Hart's poem and the style. I use factoids - I like finding out that Defoe, when he was pilloried for criticising the authorities in 1703, was pelted by the public with flowers, or that Hitler and Wittgenstein went to the same school. In the poetry game, facts play a role they don't play in prose. They're perhaps further from poetic truth than beautiful imagery is, but they're useful all the same.

• "beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", Keats, "Ode On A Grecian Urn"
• "Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays",
• "Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true", Larkin

Is poetry inside language or beyond?

You might consider this a theorist's question, of no consequence to practising poets, but it raises issues which divide poets. What's at stake is whether poetry should gravitate towards that which makes language unique (poetry being intimately involved with the language it's written in), or whether poetry should strive to escape language ("in its works of literature, a language is pointing towards its own change and development, its own becoming" - Maurice Blanchot). Is poetry beautiful or sublime?

Poetry has been used for many purposes, and competes with other genres, each having its strengths. A musical major-to-minor key change can do what words might take pages to achieve. A few images from 9/11 have an impact that no poem can match (and besides, the readers will already have seen the images). We no longer use verse as Dante or Erasmus Darwin did to expound facts because illustrated prose has taken over. In an increasingly visual age, when sound and moving images are becoming as easy to transmit as the written word, language faces even greater challenges than hitherto. Nowadays, poetry goes down well at funerals but that's about it. Poetry has to cede territory, but on whose terms?

Some poetry has retreated to the citadel, to what poetry alone can do. It draws attention to its medium - the appearance or the sound of the words - or emphasises the difference between words and the world - how a small difference in a word can have a big difference in meaning. The engagement with language is part of the poetic effect, or even the main part. In Rialto 71 Nathan Hamilton writes: "it's my feeling that, unless the primary subject of a poem remains language (directly or indirectly) ... it is likely to appear naive or drift towards unexamined cliché" In so doing it risks gives up the ground where poetry can compete on equal terms with other genres.

There's also poetry that tries to make language transparent - Holub's perhaps, or some of Hughes' Birthday Letters. Sometimes the transparency is so that a voice or events can show through clearly. Sometimes (as in Pauline Stainer perhaps) the hope is that something other than the visible shows through. The poetry tries to leap the frontier, strives to express the inexpressible. Like prayers, spells and mantras, they propel readers beyond words.

Richard Jackson in "The Cortland Review" (Winter 2006) described these tendencies more generally. As Earl Wasserman writes in "The Subtler Language", what I have called an idea-driven poem "directs us as modestly as possible to something outside itself," while language-driven poetry is real poetry "in which reference values are assimilated into the constitutive act of language; its primary purpose is to trap us in itself as an independent reality."

Ostensibly these 2 options betray radically different degrees of trust in language, but there's some common ground. The roots of language are unclear, but ritual has involved the use of words from the earliest times. And however language emerged, it evolved from grunts, roars and hisses. So both these approaches could be said to point back into language's past. The difference is that ritual-based poetry not only tries to transcend language but also the material world.

When poets discuss future trends, their own future is never far from their thoughts. Many poets don't have a range of styles in their arsenal. In particular, wordplay poets and mystics tend not to interchange styles. Fortunately there's a third way of interpreting the situation - viewing the mystics as attempting to expand the resources of language. Arguably Wordsworth did so, creating a readership for his brand of poetry. By expanding the realms of poetry the Romantics also expanded the scope of language. Richard Jackson goes on to say the experience of poetry is the very process of poetry, the struggle of language to discover what is buried within itself rather than to simply report what happened to the poet or what he or she thought or felt. Poetry is a language of discovery and transformation, not simply of "witness." One of poetry's abiding preoccupations is where to draw the line between the word and world.

As an answer to the title's question this may look like moving the goalposts, but in this case readers are both the referee and the crowd, and after all, poetry's only a game.

Popularising poetry in the UK

"The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes", wrote William Sieghart in 2008. But despite the hype, poetry sales are low. Though sales aren't the only metric of success, they indicate something about the nature of the "interest" that poetry attracts. It seems that neither the public or other poets rush to read the latest work of established experts. In a recent Telegraph article, Philip Hensher points out that Sean O'Brien's "The Drowned Book" has (according to Nielsen BookScan) sold 2,715 copies in Britain to date. How can this type of poetry be made more popular? Before this can be answered it's worth asking why we should try to popularise it, and whether reading or writing should be prioritized. Possible responses include

• Greater booksales and more workshops will lead to poets becoming richer. Workshops and university courses are far more profitable than writing books.
• If the base of the pyramid of writers is widened, the height will be increased - we'll get better poetry.
• It's a "good thing" for culture that poetry become more popular, and good for the individuals too.

I'll look first at readership trends, then writing trends, then at various initiatives.

More readers

How big an audience should poetry hope for? In "Staying Alive", Neil Astley wrote "the wider public, whose understanding of poets is two hundred years out of date and whose awareness of poetry is either a hundred years behind the times or else still stuck in the 1960s". There have always been poetry books that have sold fairly well (Pam Ayres in the UK for example) but haven't attracted critical acclaim. More rarely, respected books are given a PR push (in the UK Betjamin, Hughes etc).

I've heard it said that poetry used to be more popular and central in society than it is now. It's true that Byron sold in a big way. However I have my doubts about Golden Ages when poetry books sold by the cartload. Whatever the social factors that were present then, markets and social pressures are different now - middle-class pretension no longer controls the media, and people no longer have to pretend to like poetry or display poetry books on their shelves. And I think that some kinds of good poets will only ever have a small audience.

The statistics relating to sales of serious poetry books currently aren't encouraging

• "In the US there are 900 regular buyers of hardback poetry books and 2500 regular buyers of paperback poetry books" ("Everybody wants to be a poet", The NYT, Aug 29th, 1979, p.C17, M. Kakutoni).
• "A recent Arts Council study notes that only four per cent of the total sales of the best-selling 1000 poetry books in 1998-1999 were of contemporary poetry. The Arts Council study identifies Faber as responsible for 90 per cent of the sales ... and notes that collections by Seamus Heaney account for 67 per cent of these sales" (staple 54)
• "The survey found that the gender gap was most pronounced among poetry readers, with women outnumbering men by nearly three to one. This finding was confirmed by research commissioned by the Arts Council of England for National Poetry Day which discovered that the majority of poetry books are bought by women over the age of 45" (MsLexia, 2001)

Perhaps this only to be expected. The market for serious poetry may always have been vanishingly small, and text has more competition nowadays.

More writers

There are more visible writers than ever. According to the Higher (Aug 6th, 2004, p.22) there are 40 creative writing post-graduate degrees in the UK (the US have about 300), and over 11,000 adult education courses. It's been suggested (by Gioia et al) that in the US the loss of poetry book sales to the public has been partially compensated for by the increase in the number of set books that creative writing students buy. Writers buy each other's books. Ron Silliman in his Blog points out that "The rise from 30 post-avant poets to 3,000 has been accompanied by a huge increase in the number of readers of poetry, but not, however, in the number of readers per book". Perhaps this too can be taken as evidence that poetry-reading has reached its natural level, increasing only as the number of poetry-studiers do.

Perhaps too much poetry is being published

• Hugo Williams, judging the 147 entries for the Forward Prize, wrote in the Guardian (July 2010) that "an awful lot of them seemed to be published just because they existed, really. That's too big a number of books in one year in one country to put out."
• "There's too much bad poetry being published, polluting the pool." - Robin Robertson (Jonathan Cape editor)
• There are only 30 poetry books worth publishing each year - Don Paterson (Picador editor)

Elitist? My (perhaps overly generous) take on what they mean is that given the parlous state of "serious" poetry it's even more important that the bad doesn't drive out the the good. Performance poetry - Slams and otherwise - is on the up in the UK. So is online poetry and the use of poetry in literacy courses and therapy schemes. But just as Modern Opera goers won't be consoled by the success of Beyonce, so I doubt whether those quoted above are pleased by poetry's popularity.

Initiatives

Let's for now take for granted that extra poetic activity is a good thing. How can it be achieved? There's no shortage of material describing how cults, political parties, charities, etc can increase their activities. Groups can make current members do more evangelising to attract new members. In these isles, several efforts have been made to widen poetry's appeal. Targets have been identified and poets have been funded to help expand poetry into these markets. Targets include

• Radio 3 and 4 listeners
• Newspaper supplement readers - There may not be many poetry reviews in UK newpapers, but some of them are trying to widen poetry's appeal without dumbing down much.
  • For 3 years the Independent on Sunday had a column where a modern poem (sometimes just a year or so old) was "explained" by Ruth Padel. She made a book out of these columns ("52 Ways of Looking at a Poem" - extracts are online).
  • The Guardian ran monthly online workshops.
• Women over 45
• The professions - Doctors, Lawyers, Scientists, etc - Poets in Residence have made inroads
• The mentally ill
• Music lovers - especially Dylan and rap fans. We even had a member from Radiohead on the Next Generation Poetry panel.
• Book readers - in particular library-goers
• Celebrity groupies
• Teachers of literature
• Anyone who's interested in anything! - people who like sport or religion, for example. I read that Poetry (Chicago) are thinking of providing a service to help poets place work in non-poetry mags. If you have a poem that mentions yachts they'd tell you which Yachting mags might take it.

More generally we have poetry in subway trains, National Poetry Day, and active US-style laureates.

Arts Council England has produced Thrive! poetry project: strategic development report. Here are a few extracts

• Fragmentation and points of connection - Changes within the poetry sector are such that many question the traditional primacy of publishing and the significance attached to becoming a 'published' poet and the critical and popular success of ensuing publications. At present, a poet's significance might be judged by one or more of: publication in collections, publication of individual books or CDs, invitations to perform, size of live audiences, and prizes received. Linkages across and between the different strands and niches of the sector are poorly understood and documented.
• The established order - Many believe that at present there is an 'establishment' comprising a small number of poets and organisations with close personal connections to each other, which tends to dominate funding, publishing, media coverage and prizes.
• Reaching out to audiences - The sector is quick to point out that poetry, for all its potentially wide appeal, is a relatively 'difficult' art form that rewards sustained engagement. As a consequence the sector is keen that new audiences are exposed to poetry and encouraged to build their relationship with it, in an appropriate manner. Most feel that an appropriate manner means not denying or diluting poetry's complexity, and yet not giving the impression that poetry is only suitable for highly educated and dedicated enthusiasts.

Genres

What type of poetry will attract the masses? Does it have to be dumbed down or is it just a matter of selecting just the more accessible work of the greats?

I suspect that poetry has of late become more polarised. Nowadays much of the poetry that people read doesn't get counted in the official statistics as poetry. In the UK John Hegley and John Cooper Clarke appear with non-poets. And Performance poetry is more popular than it used to be. I suspect that Forms still have a special (though perhaps no longer privileged) place in the hearts of the common reader.

Genres may adapt to suit new media. People wanting a taster in poetry are quite likely nowadays to start on the WWW. It's been suggested that there could be poetry download sites (like music downloads)

Retention

Once a new poetry reader is on board they need to be given things to do. Too often people drawn into poetry by Residencies, best-sellers etc lose interest. My feeling is that non-anthology UK poetry bestsellers don't lead readers into the poetry world. Ted Hughes' book of poems about Plath leads to biography. And it's not clear where Heaney leads anyone - his claggy surfaces are rich enough for many to look no deeper. Follow-ups can be disappointing to the prospective poet who has too little experience to see beyond well-publicised Vanity Press organisations, and have too little experience of studying poetry to cope with many poetry books.

I don't think poetry has anything comparable to Eco's bestseller "The Name of the Rose". "it was not expected to be anything close to a best-seller... Eco himself has admitted that the first hundred pages were deliberately opaque, a sort of semi-permeable membrane that allowed passage to only the most dedicated reader. ... The novel has since taken its place as a contemporary classic, a work that for many readers has become a stepping stone from popular fiction into the world of modern literature."

One way to lock new poetry readers into a lifestyle commitment is to turn them into writers. My introduction to the poetry world was via library books of dead poets. I presume modern poetry books were there too, but I didn't recognise any of the poet's names so I didn't borrow their books. By chance one public library was the evening venue for a writers group. This led to my discovery of poetry magazines (available only by post). It was a slow journey. The web has changed all this - subcultures are no longer hidden. There are sites that let one slide from reader to writer, and anyone can edit their own magazine. This activity is hard to compare statistically with that of previous generations. My impression is that the web is helping to increase the membership of writers groups (and reading groups) and may be helping to delay the reduction in booksales.

I think that the poetry book market is in recession and institutional publishers are retreating to their heartland - the stuff that only poetry can do. Comedy? Leave that to stand-ups - they do it better. Narrative? Flash writers do it better. You may not like "pure poetry", "specialist poetry" (call it what you will) but I can understand why funds concentrate on it. It's meant that the gap between "high" and "low" poetry has been emptied, so that there's less flow and intermixing between the extremes (to the detriment of both, perhaps).

My suggestions are that

• Poetry reading and writing can be mutually re-enforcing. Contacts between to 2 activities should be kept open.
• More attention should be paid to keeping people interested in poetry after their initial trial. The sort of poetry that people first meet when they enter the poetry world may not be the poetry that sustains their interest. They need to be led beyond tempting though fruitless competitions and vanity press. If they liked Cope, what should they read next?

Pamphlet Publication in the UK

Pamphlets are becoming increasingly popular, for several reasons

• As objects they can afford to be more innovative than books.
• Some of the traditional book publishers are fading away.
• More people nowadays make a career from teaching writing and need publications for their CV. It can take years to assemble enough poems for a book. Pamphlets can be produced more frequently.
• A pamphlet needn't be padded with fillers like so many books are.
• Some "poetry books" are little more than expensive pamphlets - books by Picador etc can cost 9 pounds and contain 39 pages.
• The book world is dominated by Heaney and co. Pamphlets inhabit an alternative world of prizes and outlets, where commercialism doesn't dominate.
• Prizes now exist for pamphlets. The PBS promote them too
• The WWW offers a way to sell pamphlets. Spineless pamphlets were never popular with bookshops.

Don't think of pamphlets as an easy option, a way to publish sub-standard poems. To take just one example, "Skylight" by Carole Bromley (Smith/Doorstep 2009) has 1st prize winners from the Bridport and Yorkshire Open competitions as well as many other acknowledgements. Increasingly, poets who've already published books with reputable publishers are entering pamphlet competitions.

So how can you get your pamphlet published? Options include

• Mentoring - Fairly recently some mentoring schemes have started up (supported by Arts Council England) that scout for talent, provide help for a period and then offer the chance of publication. Smiths Knoll used to seek candidates from people who submit to their magazine. Faber had a network of talent scouts. tall-lighthouse have their pilot project
• Competitions -
  • Pighog (deadline January)
  • Flarestack (deadline March)
  • The Poetry Business (Smith/Doorstep, deadline March)
  • Cinnamon Press (deadline 31st March)
  • Templar (deadline May - they also do quarterly Templar Portfolio Awards )
  • Prole (deadline 30th June)
  • inksweatandtears (deadline 22 Sept)
  • Rialto (deadline November)
  • Iota (Ishots, deadline November)
  amongst the organisations that run competitions.
• Publishers - There are some specialist pamphlet publishers. A few publishers print pamphlets as well as books.

What's clear from all this is that participating in the poetry scene and getting published in magazines helps significantly when you want a pamphlet published. In that respect, like many others, pamphlets are like books.

Read also

• Helena Nelson (Happenstance Press) in conversation with Lindsay Macgregor (DURA)
• Issue: An Economy of Talents by Paul Maddern for more about UK poetry pamphlets
• Carrie Etter's list of pamphlet publishers
• Should poetry pamphlets be themed? (Helena Nelson)
• What do pamphlet publishers look for (Helena Nelson)
• UK poetry-pamphlet competitions (Helena Nelson)
• Fiona Moore's article about selling her poetry pamphlet
• Roy Marshall's Putting a poetry pamphlet together
• Roy Marshall's Putting a poetry pamphlet together article in The Friday Poem
• Claire Trévien's The journey to a debut poetry collection
• Emma Lee's Reasons Poetry Manuscripts get Rejected

Poetry and Society in the UK

An attempt to list the participants in the UK poetry scene, map some of their interactions, and describe their impact on the non-poetry-loving public.

The Players and their reputations

Many parties participate in the creation of the canon. In this section I'll briefly introduce them. In the next I'll look at at their interactions. The parties are roughly classified as follows

• Media
  • Anthologisers - Traditionally they have quite a lot of power, marginalising and reviving writers.
    • General - The Motion/Morrison anthology of the 80s provoked several reactions, in particular "A Various Art". Recent anthologies assembled by non-UK people ("Oxford Guide to English literature", "Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry") have reassessed the canon presented in these older anthologies - out goes Douglas Dunn, in comes J.H.Prynne.
    • Themed - Some of these (e.g. "The Faber Book of Love Poems") are aimed at the general public. Others (e.g. "A Various Art", "Naming the Waves") attempt to publicise a new school/tendency or destablize a prevailing one.
    • Annual - Two main publications
      • New Writing - sponsored by the British Council. Poetry and Prose. Mostly commissioned or agent-driven, I think.
      • The Forward Book of Poetry - prizes for best/first collection, best poem etc. Room for a few surprises amongst the short-listed pieces.
  • Magazines - The Poetry Review is far more influential than any others. The UK has few campaigning magazines though there are some women-only ones ("Writing Women", "MsLexia"), and themed ones (Shearsman - late-modernist, "Parataxis" - experimental). In the USA there are more single-school magazines - e.g. "The Formalist".
  • Book Publishers - Fewer nowadays. Does that make the remaining ones more important? Or have books in general become less influential? Smaller presses are making something of a come-back. A few publishers (Chatto, Oxford) produce(d) showcase books with about 6 new poets presented. "Forward Press" (founded in 1989, based in Peterborough) claimed to be the largest publisher of new poetry in the world. It went into creditors' voluntary liquidation on 29 November 2010. Forward Poetry now exists. They publish many anthologies (often themed) under various imprints.
  • Reviewers - Do they affect people's buying choices? Newspapers and publications like the Times Literary Supplement have few poetry reviews nowadays, and poetry magazines have an increasing rarefied audience. Even if reviews do affect sales, do book sales matter very much?
  • Newspapers - A few have weekly or even daily poems. Ruth Padel's column had an influence during her period on The Independent.
  • Radio - Programs like BBC radio 4's 'Poetry Please' reflect rather than influence public tastes.
  • TV - Negligible impact. Tony Harrison's V appeared on channel 4 and was much discussed - for the bad language as much as anything else.
  • Film - Negligible impact. My impression is that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" had a greater impact than "Sylvia".
  • Celebrities - Hughes, Heaney, John Hegley, Zephaniah and Poet Laureates attract column inches. They can be quite important, championing other poets.
• Education
  • Academics - Little impact: a life-support system keeping poets' work alive long enough for others to notice.
  • Curriculum designers - These have quite a long-lasting effect. Current trends ("creativity" vs "cultural studies" vs "national heritage") will influence the choice of poets represented and thus the set-books.
  • Creative Writing/Workshops - in the US this is a self-sustaining subculture. The UK isn't yet at that stage.
• Performance
  • Performance Poets - An increasingly popular scene and a useful springboard, though not as big as in the days of Horowitz's Albert Hall show (1965).
  • Singer/songwriters - Not a factor in the UK but elsewhere the size of their audience is significant
  • Poetry festival directors - They network as well as decide who to invite to their festivals
• Organisations/Initiatives
  • Arvon writing tutors - Their recommendations have influence with publishers, editors, etc.
  • Initiatives - National Poetry Day (promoting populist poetry?) Poems on the Underground (promoting short poetry?)
  • Competition Organisers - The Whitbread awards (and to a lesser extent the National Poetry Competition and Peterloo competition) are covered in the press. The organisers pick committees of judges who'll preserve the status quo. If big competitions are judged by (say) McGough, some types of poems will be denied the chance of publicity. The Poetry Business competition winners have a book published - such competitions are much more common in the USA.
  • Local poetry groups (word of mouth) - negligible influence.
  • Poetry Society - Involved with many national initiatives, so its stance matters. It also publishes the "Poetry Review".
  • The Poetry Book Society - sells discounted books by post and recommends certain books. In 2004 they had a 100k ACE grant and about 2,300 members.
  • Grant-giving organisations - NESTA (who sometimes give 6 figure sums to poets), the Society of Authors, the British Council (who have an agenda).
  • Regional Arts - The Arts Council feeds money to regional offices. They are in control of grants and residencies, and can have quite an impact on the type of poetry encouraged in a region. Sometimes they support magazines and wider participation, sometimes they focus funds on individual writers. Here are some rough figures from the list of regularly funded organisations in 2008, to give you an idea of scale - Arvon £320k, Poetry Society £260k, New Writing Partnership £200k, Carcanet £110k, The Poetry School, £100k, Bloodaxe £90k, Anvil £90k.
• Movements - Based on common race, ethnic background, gender, style, etc - feminists, experimentalist, Welsh-speaking. These used to be loose agglomerations of friends who lived in the same region, though nowadays organisations like the "Long Poetry group" survive with a scattered membership. Improved communications (e.g. using the WWW) have made distance less of an issue.

Several of these agents are also importers.

The Action

If one wants to influence events or make progress it helps to know how these groups interact, and how one thing leads to another. Some of the bodies mentioned above have little power or influence but can act as a useful bridge between other bodies, formalising the "Old Boys Networks" of the past. Relations between these various power bases aren't always cordial - links are fluid and alliances temporary.

In the UK a small group of friends can be in control of various groups (publishers, judging committees), and from time to time people suspect a poetry mafia. The Poetry Society plays a central role in national events, as a transmitter at least. To take a hypothetical example, suppose a famous poet reveals in a Sunday newspaper supplement's interview to having suffered years of mental health problems. This opportunity could be exploited by poetry-as-therapy groups, who'll have a chance to write follow-up articles, appear on the radio, and have a more sympathetic reaction to grant-applications. An association with the "Poetry Society" would strengthen their hand, with the possibility of longer term National Lottery or National Health Service support. A "Poetry Review" feature would put the poets on the map. There'd be more workshop tutoring openings for sympathetic poets who in turn will be able to write more, and sell more. They may champion the cause of certain neglected poets from the past, or be asked to put together a themed anthology. The participating poets become better known and more influential, being asked to judge competitions. Before long there could be a small but perceptible shift in the poetry climate - even a shift towards a pre-existing pigeon-hole like confessional poetry.

A few examples serve to illustrate the diversity and transience of associations (some of which are one-way)

• Media
  • Magazines are read by contributors and other editors. Nowadays book publishers are unlikely to look there for talent. With major publishers less interested in the poetry market, new ventures have appeared linking poets to publication
    • Magazines are beginning to publish books again - "Rialto" and "Acumen" for example.
    • Creative Writing courses (UEA, Sheffield) are producing anthologies of work, magazines or even single-author books.
    • High-quality books are being published online - the Shearsman Gallery series for example.
• Education
  • Academia and creative writing are no longer in opposition - creative writing is now finding its way onto university syllabuses and MA courses. According to the Higher (Aug 6th, 2004, p.22) there are 40 creative writing post-graduate degrees in the UK (the US have about 300), and over 11,000 adult education courses.The established centres (Norwich, Machester, etc) act as magnets for writers, conferences and publications.
  • The UK usually lags behind the USA in curriculum development. Currently the trend is away from creative writing (and before that heritage preservation) towards cultural studies (Carol Ann Duffy, etc).
• Performance
  • The ability to perform is becoming more necessary for published poets in the UK, which has helped traffic in the other direction. Several semi-regular venues exist, even outside London. A mix of performance specialists and book-based writers read. Other outlets are festivals, schools and events run by libraries/councils. Poetry Slams are on the increase, the UK championships being televised by BBC3 in 2004.

    Recordings of modern poetry are uncommon though in Poetry Review V94.1 (Spring 2004) there was a CD featuring Lavinia Greenlaw, Tom Raworth, Keston Sutherland, etc.

  • With music as vehicle, poetry can reach bigger audiences. North America has a tradition of Poet/Songwriter links. Dylan, Cohen, etc produce lyrics which work on the page, and in the USA some performance poets use music and sell CDs. The performance circuit in the USA is sympathetic to musical support (percussion and bass guitar if nothing else). Joy Harjo speaks poetry over a musical/jazz backdrop (John Betjeman in the UK did it with a Cello, I seem to recall). And there are Performance Artists who use if not poetry then at least words - e.g. Laurie Anderson of "O Superman" fame.
    France (at least until the early 70s) had strong lyricist links too (Greco sang Prévert and Apollinaire, Jean Ferrat sang Aragon) and also there were singers who were considerable poets - Brel, Aznavour, Trenet, Barbara, Brassens.
    In the UK I think only the Beatles have gained any respect as lyricists.
• Organisations/Initiatives
  • The New Generation Poets campaign (mid 90s) made an impact and is still discussed a decade later - "A new wave of poets has been scooping the prizes", it was claimed. The Poetry Society administered it (when Peter Forbes was Poetry Review editor). Most of the choices were very safe bets - all the poets had been published by major companies. 20 poets (under 40 years old or having had their first book published in the previous 5 years) were promoted in bookshops, in a series of readings and in the media. Support came from BBC Radio 1 (a pop music channel), the Arts Council, the British Council, various smaller charities, Waterstones (booksellers), and the publishers of the poets. Not all the poets were enthusiastic about the venture. I suspect it boosted the career of some marginal figures (Sue Wicks, Sarah Maguire).
    The Next Generation Poets were announced in June 2004 - 20 poets who'd had their first book published in the previous 10 years. 7 judges: 3 poets (Motion, Armitage, Evaristo), a short-story writer, a member from Radiohead, someone from the PBS and a radio journalist. The 5 page article in the Guardian included no poetry but had a 2-page photo-spread.
  • National Poetry Day has become established. It's a chance for organisations to combine forces, keeping poetry in the public eye.
  • The slant of the Poetry Review editorship affects the UK poetry climate. During Eric Mottram's reign (1972-1977) experimentalists had a look-in. Currently one of the editors reviews for the Guardian and is sympathetic to the so-called avant-garde, re-opening that channel of communication. But such shifts can foment rebellion amongst the mainstream membership.
• Movements - Movements can have tie-ins with Anthologies, Magazines, Presses and Festivals. In some other countries (Italy for example) movements are self-defining and manifesto-driven (an early example being the Futurists). UK movements are less strident, more of a journalistic convenience. Indeed, the unity of such groups ("The Movement", "The Lakeside Poets", "The Martian Poets") is sometimes an illusion created by posterity or the press. Take for example "the Cambridge School". Nobody belongs it. By day they teach Keats to younger generations but under cover of darkness they experiment in their labs, producing small-circulation leaflets or books published by Salt, maintaining international contacts, and meeting yearly at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. Movements are amongst the most vulnerable components of the poetry community. Their survival depends on how well they exploit networking, but the marketing benefit of self-branding can cause internal tension -
  • Solidarity and individuality can be in conflict. In the UK black feminists found themselves fighting on several fronts - should they align with white feminists? with black males? or against black males, striving for representation within the black movement? In the USA, feminist writing had a more experimental edge than it did here (Emily Dickinson may have been the cause. Rich helped). In the UK Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley (and from the less experimental tradition Carol Rumens) were quiet at first then criticised the regressive poetic styles of feminist anthologies.
  • Forms are considered old-fashioned in some countries but in others they're used by the avant-garde. In the UK modernism never took hold and forms remain in the mainstream.
  • The mainstream-experimental divide waxes and wanes. Every so often like a lightning bolt a name crosses the chasm and tension lessens. Just as often each side remain invisible to the other. J.H.Prynne's a case in point. He's unmentioned in most general anthologies, though his collected poems were nominated for a New Yorker book prize. In China, a translation of "Pearls That Were" (only 500 copies of which were produced in England) has sold more than 50,000 copies. Edward Larrissey (author of 'William Blake' etc) wrote that Prynne's poems are as "rich, complex and powerfully original as any poetry written in the English-speaking world in this century". Andrew Duncan views J.H. Prynne's 'The White Stones' as being 'probably the most significant single volume of the 1960's.' Duncan, like many putative avant-garde sympathisers, reads widely. Though keen on Ted Hughes he thinks that "Larkin never managed to write a good poem,... The one moment which saves him from complete vileness is the phrase 'accoutred frowsty barn'". As Peter Middleton writes (in Poetry Review V94.1, p.53-54), "The avant-garde and voice-based poets don't share values, poetics or literary theories"

Career Paths

The traditional career path (publication in reputable magazines leading to pamphlet then book publication, then inclusion in anthologies) is still viable for some mainstream poets, but there are other ways in, exploiting the routes described above. Flexibility and risk-taking are required to exploit these options. Such an approach is hard to combine with a conventional 9-5 job or parenthood. Describing the US situation, Sam Hamill wrote that "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. ... The typical poet teaches". The UK isn't like that yet, but the signs are there. Unless one commits oneself to poetry wholeheartedly, one might be restricted to the traditional paths thus having one's progress delayed.

Winning the National Poetry competition will make a poet momentarily more famous, and may result in book publication, but this will not lead to climatic change unless another factor is present. Such a factor could be the unlikeliness of the person winning (by virtue of age, education, etc). It's unlikely that the winning poem will be innovative - the judges are mainstream and besides, they're in a committee. So the poet might need to follow the links listed above to amplify their influence. Fellow poets, the public and anthologisers will use different criteria to evaluate success. To be a successful published poet nowadays it's useful to be a performer and to be able to run workshops, but as we'll see later, there's a limit to how many groups one can join - some are mutually exclusive.

• The USA's Associated Writing Programs offer a different way to fame in a literary world - master-classes, guest readings, etc. I read recently that at Brigham Young University "3 poems equals one research paper published in a peer reviewed journal".
• John Hegley, Ian McMillan, etc have made the transition from stage to page.
• The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets became known by being the subject of critical discussion by scholars, being included in specialist magazines and invited to international conventions. Cambridge School poets follow a similar path.
• In the UK the range of options for career development has widened.
  • Lavinia Greenlaw is successful in publishing (with Faber) and major competitions. Her CV reads like a career guidance manual - 1990: Eric Gregory Award; 1995: Science Museum residency. Arts Council Writers Award, and British Council Fellow; 1997: Wingate Scholarship; 2000: three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, also reader-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall; 2003: Cholmondeley Award. Jobs include arts administrator, freelance writer, reviewer and radio broadcaster, teaching on a Creative Writing MA Programme and working on the Tate and Hayward Gallery education programmes.
  • Mario Petrucci (Ph.D in physics) took a more performance/workshop-based approach with Blue Nose poets and ShadoWork. He's a qualified secondary school teacher and "a leading exponent for site-specific poetry and has devised a number of successful residencies involving public art", including a Year-of-the-Artist scheme which led to the schools Poetry Study Pack in Essex and Havering. He's a regular Arvon tutor and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. He's had a residency at the War Museum, London.
  Both these poets have tapped into many of the power-bases listed earlier. Neither align themselves to any particular movement (though each have specialisations: Greenlaw science, and Petrucci war). Both have written successful prose. Only by being active on many fronts do they have any hope of earning a living by writing.

Another route is to take advantage of Consultancy and Mentoring.

The Public

My suspicion is that very few poets are known to adults beyond the poetry world. Exceptions are: Motion (poet laureate who writes articles on Dylan, soccer chants, etc), Heaney, Paulin (known by arty types because he appears on a TV review show), Hegley, McGough and Zephaniah. I suspect more people have heard of Attila the Stockbroker and John Cooper-Clark than Simon Armitage, though Armitage (and Sophie Hannah) has recently become better known though his prose.

My guess is that while Arts-minded people might feel obliged to see particular films and plays, or read certain novels, they don't feel the same pressure to keep up-to-date with poetry. As Rupert Loydell said at Warwick University's "Poetry in Crisis" debate, "poetry as an art form does not seem to be part of our culture".

In the "Rhyme and Reason" survey, family, education and media were the 3 influences most cited as reasons for being interested in poetry. Much of the poetry world is isolated from the general public, though there are a few points of contact. Again, I'll group according to broad categories

• Media - The greatest outbursts of poetry tend to be after events like the death of princess Diana. Regular events like the Whitbread prize-giving and Poetry Day events still receive coverage. Whenever the poet laureate publishes a poem (most recently on England's rugby success) the media cover it. But the event that gained the most attention of late was probably when a writer was given £2,000 by Northern Arts in 2002. Words were painted on sheep's backs to create a new form of "random" literature. According to the poet "I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep."
  • Magazines - The general public rarely sees specialist poetry magazines - some are on sale in the Borders bookshop chain, but that's about the limit of their visibility.
  • Newspapers - Ruth Padel's column in the Independent tried to explain modern poems to the lay-reader. The columns were collected in a book - "52 ways of looking at a poem".
  • Radio - The people who listen get what they expect
  • Books - Only Heaney amongst living poets sells in worthwhile quantities. Themed anthologies dominate the poetry book sales, especially around Christmas.
  • Films - sometimes spark interest
  • Celebrities - people like Viggo Mortenson attract attention. The current poet laureate (Andrew Motion) does a good job of keeping poetry in the news. Benjamin Zephaniah writes for kids as well as adults, and got publicity when he was candidate for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
• Education
  • Traditionally, teachers of English who have been introduced to poetry through their work acquire an interest in contemporary poetry.
  • There are many more "creative writing" evening classes nowadays
• Performance - Hegley does slots in mainstream variety shows as a poet/stand-up-comic.
• Organisations/Initiatives
  • The annual Poetry Day, and in particular "Poetry on the Underground" give people the chance to meet poetry and poets.
  • Residencies (in museums, take-aways, department stores, etc) offer a way for non-poets to engage in poetry. Attempts have been made to target particular professions (scientists, etc) and Arts (poetry as "the New Rock'n'Roll").

Most of these brief encounters lead to nothing. Not infrequently follow-ups can be disappointing to the prospective poet who has too little experience to see beyond well-publicised Vanity Press organisations, and has too little experience of studying poetry to cope with many poetry books. The "Poetry on the Underground" scheme spawned a book which has sold well, and once someone buys a poetry book there's a chance that they'll buy another, though poetry books are thin and expensive compared to epic novels.

The WWW has become the first place to look for those with an emerging interest in poetry. This interest can easily spread to non-WWW activities - many writers groups have grown since the advent of the WWW, and poetry books are often bought online.

The Future

The WWW provides a hitherto unavailable direct link from the public to contemporary poetry material and dedicated poetry groups. This bypassing for traditional media/organisations might have several consequences

• The situation is likely to grow more dynamic as institutions (in the form of paper magazines) lose their influence and more international links develop. General anthologies will be treated with more suspicion. With groupings being WWW-mediated, it will be easier to belong to contrasting groups.
• WWW-books and magazines may gain more respect as paper magazines fade away. Arts Council England's 2007-2011 vision statement said "While not disregarding the benefits of traditional production and distribution methods, we want to see these presses and magazines take a lead in developing new methods of distribution and explore new uses of technology for both publishing and distribution", which may signal further pressure on paper magazines.
  As more people use MP3 players, audio poetry/magazines will grow in popularity.
• Major publishers are publishing even fewer books by new poets. In March 2007, George Szirtes in "The StAnza Lecture" said "Bloodaxe's noble act of redress in favouring women poets means that very talented young male poets have really only had Michael Schmidt's Carcanet to go to, before applying to less influential publishers, since houses such as Faber, Cape and Picador take on very few new poets of either gender". Small presses show signs of filling the gap - the recent Forward Prizes had more small press representation than even before.
• Poetry organisations will tend to prefer the general media to literary channels when advertising events.

In the UK the increase in creative writing Higher Education courses will open new, more stable, job opportunities and lead to more flexible career plans.

Once the links between organisations are better understood perhaps money can be more effectively spent on networking rather than on organisations or magazines. The rift between intellectuals (not just scientists) and poetry has led to poetry being starved of useful input and audience. Also the career difficulties of those forced to follow traditional routes is detrimental to the development of poetry. It may even prove useful to constrict the flow along certain links. An "anyone-can-write" initiative, broadening the base of the pyramid, is one way to bring new money to poets who are prepared to be tutors, but it may not help the poets' writing.

Postscript (June 2013)

Salt's decision in May 2013 to no longer publish new single-author poetry books was covered by The Guardian where they say that "Official figures from Nielsen BookScan show a sharp decline in the overall poetry market in the last year. There was growth of around 13% in 2009, when the market was worth £8.4m, followed by small declines in 2010 and 2011, and then a major drop of 18.5% volume and 15.9% value in 2012, when the overall value of the market fell to £6.7m. … Over the past two years, according to BookScan, the three bestselling poetry titles have all been by Duffy". Later The Guardian published Poetry is not drowning, but swimming into new territory, part of a wider discussion that the Salt news has precipitated. Here are some articles that are worth a read

• So. Farewell then / Salt poetry books ... ("A free-market capitalist system is no less bizarre, in its dealings with literature, than any old-style communist regime that favoured socialist realism and sent other forms underground" - Charles Boyle)
• The Health of Poetry ("We seem to be moving towards a model where people are kept ‘emerging’ for as long as possible – preserved in a kind of hopeful limbo, where they can gain lots of encouragement and support, but also spend lots of money on mentors and Arvon courses and MAs and competition fees and retreats" - Clare Pollard).
  ("When Arts Council England made its last round of funding decisions, support for writer development was massively increased at the same time that presses like Arc, Enitharmon and Flambard were told their annual funding was to be scrapped … Print on demand isn’t compatible with promoting poetry to a wider readership" - Neil Astley)
• Ripples on a smooth sea, or storm in a teacup? (Adrian Slatcher)

See Also

• "Poetic Culture", Christopher Beach, Northwest University Press, 1999
• Rhyme and Reason: Developing Contemporary Poetry
• "The Oxford English Literary History, vol 12, 1960-2000: The Last of England", OUP, 2004
• "Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry", A. Motion and B. Morrison (eds), 1982
• "Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry", Keith Tuma (ed), Oxford University Press, 2001
• "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", Andrew Duncan, Salt, 2004
• "A Various Art", Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (eds), Carcanet, 1987
• "52 ways of looking at a poem", Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus, 2002