The New British School, from a US perspective

http://www.digitalemunction.com/2009/10/07...-british-school

I think I understood about one word in three of that essay.

I need to get out more.

You feel foolish, Rik? Try this for size!

Well, Kent Johnson is always commenting on the Harriet blog, etc... the main drawback of the essay seems to me to be its complete lack of quotations from the poetry. But then, it's intended as a call to arms, not a critical analysis.

Anyone click on the links? Keston Sutherland reading from "Hot White Andy" - first of all , a wonderful comment below, saying "I have Keston for close reading lectures at Sussex Uni, and he acts like this ALL the time. He's quite inspiring if you like that sort of thing." Made me laugh. Sweet. And in the poem itself, you have to love "chi chi news noose."

Oh, hang on Jane. I see that was what you were linking to!

Heck, Jane! And you moaned about that 'poem' I posted a few weeks back?

I made it to 2mins 26secs before pausing to push <clap> my brain back in<pop>to my skull ... Stan!

"arabesque of equivalence"?

Hmm. And who said the Baroque was over.

Sometimes I wonder if we're on the same planet, Katy. Sweet? ... have to love ... ?

No!

Now I know what I've been doing wrong. Forgetting to add sound FX and not speaking backwards like Aleister Crowley.

If we have to call that a poem, there can be no parameters left, surely? Except dumb show and a series of animal mewlings on a dark stage.

Jane, I defy anyone not to like "chi chi news noose." It suggests all sorts of permutations and innovations - and you know, by saying something you make it real. The chi chi mews moose. The chi chi abuse caboose. The chi chi trews truce. Come on.

"Geof­frey Hill’s Mer­cian Hymns was noth­ing more than a bru­tally Anglo­cen­tric Enoch-Powell-like reposte to Brig­gflatts that refused to acknowl­edge Bunting’s accom­plish­ment."

Now there's an interesting supposition!

This is a glimpse into a sphere of British poetry that doesn't often get an airing here. I shan't begin a defence, but when in other quarters words like "serious" and "genius" are used I've heard similar vocab used around Keston and I think that this movement deserves attention (and it's getting it, a lot of it). It does have serious, as in academic, support, which has created a parallel universe for the reception of British poetry and its discussion. I think it's certainly worth everyone's considered attention — though finding a way into this work can be troubling — there aren't many places to find introductions for general readers into what's going on in work of this kind.

I think Keston is, as David Kennedy has suggested, an important figure, a vital figure even, in contemporary poetry. He's a very smart bloke with an exceptional mind. A fierce critical intelligence and also very funny.

Katy, Baroque is such an interesting choice of word as it is in fact central in much thinking around Cambridge poetry.

Me too, Katy – a tremendously ambiguous, gauche, winning comment.

I rather like 'White Hot Andy', though I have reservations.

Tony, me too. For one, with a view.

Chris, go on... And, vis a vis your remark about academic attention, I get the impression that Kent Johnson is precisely calling for a more general - not academic - recognition of this New British Poetry. It reminds me of when I used to go to people's houses to babysit, and they'd have these Faber poetry collections - Spender, Auden, Thom Gunn... all at that stage still alive & kicking of course.

I think there is a need for a more general assessment of the poetries emerging from the British avant-garde scene. I've published a great deal of course, and there's certainly enough evidence for a reassesment of what was going on Cambridge in the 90s. It's too highly coloured with Divisionist ideology to get a clear picture from outside. It is properly underground but has really very striking uptake with US universities, certainly Buffalo, Miami (OH), UPenn, but much much wider than this. But those US allegiances are misleading as I think the British avant-garde have to be read from the peculiar social and cultural framework of the British 60s. We never had a 1968 moment. The political content of much 90s British avant-garde writing has its origins in a liberation from post-War thrift and limitation, it derives its thrust from a cultural exuberance not a political fracture or civil rights revolution. Its politics are received. You can't of course have a politics without a polity.

There are two aspects I find fascinating, the first is nostalgia. A great deal of British avant-garde writing is deeply nostalgic and utopian, and that's partly I suspect a feature that it has yet to be properly assessed, digested, positioned, it's been locked out of cultural debate and a history of poetics in the UK due in part to the Poetry Wars and their legacy. It's almost as if we can imagine a poetry purgatory, not Dante's but a kind of limbo where much of this writing has not been assimilated into a wider history of British poetry. It's stuck but not of its own accord.

And the second thing I find fascinating is what I call Liberation Poetics, the idea that poetry has been enslaved in some consumerist conspiracy, and that leads to a kind of messianic quality in some work, and, as I've remarked before, a lot in Keston's. This kind of poetry needs to be outside, needs to be oppressed and needs to be secret. It can't accommodate or mediate as it relies on an extreme position and in many respects requires converts and acolytes, neophytes and indeed some Grand Masters. It's religious in effect. One has to believe. Though a key feature of the dogma is to express doubt, uncertainty and incompleteness, just as it embraces process over product, openness over closure and radicalism over restraint. It's chief weapon is excess. And of course it is oppositional.

All of this makes for a fascinating landscape. But it's one that can feel like entering a sect, even for an afternoon of mysterious indoctrination. It is however, filled with great and yes, serious, art.

Defy away. It means nothing to me.

On Radio 3's The Word last night, it sounded as if Fiona Sampson had air-brushed out that poetry from her antho of Poetry Review through-the-ages. When McMillan pressed the point, she said that the selection was made for the benefit of the "mainstream reader"

As an editor, I am open to most things, including this ... type of work. As an editor, I have to be open to it, otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job properly. But as a poet myself, and as a reader/listener, I have no problems in saying that I dislike it intensely.

It makes me suspect utter charlatanism, because it provides no stable ground from which to form a measured opinion. Listening to it and trying to 1. make sense of it and 2. work out whether it's worth my time is like trying to get a spirit level to balance on the wing of a tilting airplane at high altitude. If I was going out for an evening of idle entertainment, and this only lasted 3 minutes, I might find it amusing and exhilarating. But to be asked to look on it as 'serious art' and on Keston himself as some kind of Messiah of Poetry makes everything inside me rebel.

Re Fiona's remark, I can't particularly criticise her decision to exclude that kind of work. I'm reviewing the PR book for Stride, so I won't say much here, but it is a book aimed at the mainstream reader, just as Poetry Review, frankly, is aimed at the mainstream reader. (Except for brief periods of its history, when the red flag was flying above Poetry HQ!!!) If Angel Exhaust put out, as an example - and maybe it has, I can't recall now - an anthology of its best bits, you can be pretty sure you wouldn't find the likes of Seamus Heaney in there.

I think that is a considered response, Jane. I've no problem at all with Fiona's work at Poetry Review, it is a mainstream members' mag and she's very much in Peter Forbes' footsteps. Incidentally, where is he now?

Well, I've just read the entire thread over there and left a typically Pollyanna-ish response which will no doubt make some of their more pugnacious commenters retch.

I was struck by the way an emphasis on orthodoxy and ideological positions passed for thinking about poetry. More talk of positioning than poems. Some of it real teenage stuff, and except for one woman, all boys together. Well, not news. So I've waded in like the mother and told them to open the windows. Ms Cool, right?

And the funny thing is, poetry is what I'm interested in! Words and what they can do, meaning and where it resides.

Jane, the thing I meant above was that I enjoyed the playfulness of it. I wasn't looking for literal meaning, it was really just a phrase that leapt out and made me smile. But then I've also enjoyed reading Prynne.

Fiona presides over a very boring magazine. I cancelled my PS membership, it was so boring. And her response to the Women's Letter shows her to be just as hidebound in her thinking as some of those commenters are. Like them, she seems more worried about What The Neighbours Might Think, and where people sit on the totem pole, than in poetry itself.

Oh, time for some coffee I think. This kind of stuff just gets my goat...

PS - I was also struck, on that interminable thread, by the incredible BADNESS of most of the commenters' prose!! Not just the length and turgidity of it, the lack of paragraph breaks and the indirect verbs - not just jargon, which you expect - but weak syntax, ungrammatical constructions and wrongly used words. Also, complete lack of examples. The few commenters there who could express themselves naturally were as beacons.

@ Chris ... Blimey, now you're asking. I've no idea. Does he owe you money?

Katy, I don't find everything in PR equally interesting, it's true. But I don't find it boring either. I cancelled my membership during the Herd/Potts regime because I no longer recognised the magazine, it seemed to be aimed at a very small group of white, male academics. Now the readership is very broad indeed. Maybe that's 'boring' for some people. But at least it means we have one poetry magazine in this country that goes on sale in good bookshops and isn't completely ignoring all those people out there who are not actually poets.

And I'm sure in Fiona's position I would not have rolled over and said in response to that letter, "Oh my god, you're so right." What did you expect? A full and contrite apology? You defend your own ground, you have to. Besides which, she listened, she took action, more women are now reviewing collections by men, etc. Well, I certainly am. She gave me two men last time (if you'll forgive the rather saucy shorthand) and two men this time. So things are moving in the right direction. Eventually, we'll have got rid of all the male critics entirely and none of the women's collections will be reviewed.