|
With Art and
Literature, most of us rely on other people to
select our reading/ listening/ watching material
for us. That's not because we're stupid, or can't
think for ourselves, it's because there's so much
stuff out there, that we could spend centuries of
time that most mortals don't have to spare, reading
through, listening to or looking at utter crap and
only occasionally finding something that we like.
So, as with many things in life, we use 'experts'
to do some filtering for us.
That's not an idea
that I've made up entirely on my own. Other people
have said similar things - for instance Chris
Anderson in his book The Long Tail has gone into the precise
reasons why we do this sort of thing, the
mechanisms we use collectively to screen the art
and literature we consume and the implications all
of that has for businesses and for our
economies.
As a habit that we
humans have, our reliance on experts is not always
entirely a good thing. Whenever you get experts,
you get an element of crap and mumbo-jumbo as those
experts try to do things to preserve the monopoly
that they claim to have over Truth. Classic
examples of that principle at work are Lawyers and
Priesthoods, but many other expert coteries do this
sort of thing.
With Poetry, it's
particularly bad. Most people like poetry to some
extent and even need it in their lives. That's why
so many advertising jingles rhyme - on a base
level, they appeal to us by using the power that
wordplay has over us. Jokes and shaggy dog stories
and urban myths are full of similar things. All
this is evidence of how wordplay can grab our
attention and stick around in our minds. Way before
people had bluetooth headsets for their mobile
phones, you could see them apparently talking to
themselves, in traffic-jams in their cars. That was
because they would be singing along to their
favourite song-lyrics.
The Poetry
Establishment has lost touch with the need for
poetry that exists amongst ordinary people.
Instead, it caters for a bizarre and esoteric set
of tastes that prevails amongst a clan of 'experts'
whose expertise consists of examining the contents
of their own and each other's back passages. It's a
bit like people who sang 'traditional' folk music
in the 1970s. They would sing in some sort of a
strange nasal whine of a voice that they probably
intended to sound like a 19th century rural accent.
They convinced themselves that the sound they made
was beautiful, but most ordinary 'folk' didn't seem
to agree with them.
I would see their folk
singing as having about as much in common with
historical reality and actual peasant life as the
specially scrubbed cows that Marie Antoinette and
her courtiers used to hand-milk. She and her
friends would play at being milkmaids and
shepherdesses in the grounds of Versailles just as
some prosperous modern folk singers like to play at
being 19th century factory workers or farm hands.
Reality caught up with Marie Antoinette in the
shape of Madame la Guillotine. Reality has not
intruded on our Poetry Establishment and English
Folk Singers in quite such a brutal way, but the
great mass of people have made their opinions clear
by simply ignoring them. Specially scrubbed poets
are sometimes wheeled out on the more arty and
intellectual of our national radio stations,
groomed to appeal to the great and sweaty masses by
coming out with something that sounds vaguely like
real poetry to most common people. However if you
try to win a poetry competition with stuff like
that, you will be instantly ignored.
This may sound a bit
extreme, but again, it's not a view that's mine
alone. Douglas Adams was way more extreme about it
when he satirised poetry in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy. Here's
what he had to say about poetry there :
Vogon poetry is of course the
third worst in the Universe. The second worst is
that of the Asgoths of Kria. During a recitation by
their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his
poem 'Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In
My Armpit One Midsummer Morning' four of his
audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the
President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council
survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
Grunthos is reported to have been
'disappointed' by the poem's reception, and was
about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book
epic entitled My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles when
his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to
save life and civilisation, leapt straight through
his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all
perished along with its creator Paula Nancy
Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England
in the destruction of the planet Earth.
Prostetnic
Vogon Jeltz smiled very slowly. This was done not
so much for effect as because he was trying to
remember the sequence of muscle movements. He had
had a terribly therapeutic yell at his prisoners
and was now feeling quite relaxed and ready for a
little callousness.
The prisoners sat in Poetry
Appreciation chairs - strapped in.
[...snip...]
Ford was
rasping for breath. He rolled his dusty tongue
round his parched mouth and moaned. Arthur said
brightly:
'actually I quite liked it'.
Ford turned and gaped. Here was
an approach that had quite simply never occurred to
him. The Vogon raised a surprised eyebrow that
effectively obscured his nose and was therefore no
bad thing.
'Oh good...' he whirred, in
considerable astonishment.
'Oh yes,' said Arthur, 'I thought
that some of the metaphysical imagery was really
particularly effective. Ford continued to stare at
him, slowly organising his thoughts around this
totally new concept. Were they really going to be
able to bareface their way out of this.?
'Yes, do continue...' invited the
Vogon.
'Oh... and er... interesting
rhythmic devices too,' continued Arthur 'which
seemed to counterpoint the... er ... er ...' he
floundered. Ford leaped to his rescue,
hazarding
'...counterpoint the surrealism
of the underlying metaphor of the ... er ...' He
floundered too, but Arthur was ready again.
'... humanity of the ....'
'VOGONITY,' Ford hissed at
him.
'Ah yes, Vogonity (sorry) of the
poet's compassionate soul,' Arthur felt he was on
the home stretch now, 'which contrives through the
medium of the verse structure to sublimate this,
transcend that, and come to terms with the
fundamental dichotomies of the other,' (he was
reaching a triumphant crescendo...) 'and one is
left with a profound and vivid insight into ...
into ... er ...' (...which suddenly gave out on
him.) Ford leaped in with the coup de grace:
'Into whatever it was that the
poem was about!' he yelled. Out of the corner of
his mouth: 'Well done Arthur, that was very
good.'
The Vogon
perused them. For a moment his embittered racial
soul had been touched, but he thought no - too
little too late. His voice took on the quality of a
cat snagging brushed nylon.
'So what you're saying is that I
write poetry because underneath my mean callous
heartless exterior I really just want to be loved,'
he said. He paused. 'Is that right?' Ford laughed a
nervous laugh.
'Well I mean yes,' he said,
'don't we all, deep down, you know ... er ...' The
Vogon stood up.
'No, well you're completely
wrong,' he said, 'I just write poetry to throw my
mean callous exterior into sharp relief. I'm going
to throw you off the ship anyway. Guard! Take the
prisoners to number three airlock and throw them
out!'
I tend to divide
poetry into three types - 'real crap', 'also-rans'
and 'good'.
With a poem that's
destined to fall into the first category, I look at
for a moment or two. And then I think to myself 'no
way am I going to read this'. Bleugh...!!!!
The 'also-ran'
category has something in those first few lines
that catches my attention and so I decide that I
want to read on. However, as I do this, I find that
it does not live up to its initial promise and so I
start to read faster and faster. By the time I
reach the end, I am pretty much skimming and if you
challenged me to tell you what the poem was about,
I would struggle.
The 'good' ones grab
me at the beginning and continue to keep my
attention the whole way through.
That's as far as my
triage of poetry goes. Category three - the 'good'
stuff - covers a multitude of poets who may be
considered 'good' or 'bad' in official
categorisations and who range from William
McGonagall to Geoffrey Chaucer. Categories one and
two include most poets writing right now, and huge
numbers of past 'greats' too. But not all of
them.
So anyway, to conclude
this piece on Why is Most Poetry Such
Garbage? here
is my explanation as to why we have a situation
where many people like poetry but are turned away
from it in their droves.
Most elites which hold
power of some kind go through revolutions from time
to time. Political dynasties are overthrown and
torn down and Brave New Worlds are built in their
place by new regimes who usually claim legitimacy
based on the will of the people, or something like
it.
Revolutions amongst
artistic elites are often similar. Usually, the
'old' world that has been overthrown is seen as
elitist and undemocratic while the new one claims
not to be those things. Pretty soon however, it
begins taking on all the characteristics of an
elite, while carefully avoiding the superficial
behaviours of its predecessor.
In my bio page on this
site, I mentioned a non-fiction writing project
that I'm pursuing. In that, I use the example of
poetry to show how tools and structure can be
misused. But exactly the same example shows how one
elite managed to displace another one in the way I
just described:
In the
18th and 19th Centuries, the English language and
culture had produced some fine poets. On the whole
they tended to write poetry where the ends of the
lines would rhyme to some extent. The syllables
were usually arranged to a pleasing beat and often
had the same number of beats in each line. It was
pretty much structured stuff all the way down the
line. Poetry had various formulae that you could
follow - sonnets, quatrains, ballads. There's a
whole academic discipline out there devoted to
analysing and categorising the different forms of
verse.
Other people saw
the success of those poets and thought to
themselves "I could do that too..." So they wrote
poems with lines that rhymed and scanned and were
littered with references to the Greek Gods because
on the whole, that's quite easy to do. Not all of
them were great poets but because their work rhymed
and scanned successfully and smacked of a classical
education, some people thought it was poetry, and
some other people were put off as a result because
it was often poor stuff really and boring if not
downright embarrassing.
In the 20th century
some more great poets came along. They saw what had
been happening and did not want to be associated
with any of that. So they wrote poems that did not
always rhyme and scan and because they were great
poets, they got away with it. But the trouble was,
the other people who were not so good, thought that
this was even better. They thought that you could
write any old introverted, introspective and
slightly weird stuff down, and that as long as you
chopped it into lines that were more or less the
same length, then THAT was poetry. So even MORE
people were put off as a result of that.
I don't follow
particular structures in my pomes out of some
misguided obligation to a previous incarnation of
the Poetry Establishment. But neither do I
meticulously avoid the old forms in order to pander
to the prejudices of the present incumbents. I just
do what the hell I want to and write what I feel. I
may be out of step with various precious elites
that sees themselves as the present arbiter of
poetic taste. But I think that I am tuned into
something bigger and wider and deeper than any one
elite.
I hope that you, who
read this, like some of what you find here, but
even if you don't go so far as to actually like it,
I hope that you managed to read some of my stuff to
the end without your eyes glazing over with
boredom. If I achieved that much, then that is
greatness enough for me.
Andy Morley,
Blackburn, West Lothian, 30th October 2007
Please
close this browser window to get back to where you
were before.
November 4th
2007
I posted
this essay on various web forums in early November
'07. Here are a couple of replies that it
produced :
--- In
Literature@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Fawcus"
<s.fawcus@...> wrote:
It seems to
me that poetry disassociated itself from a wider
public with the advent of modernism. Up until the
end of the 19th Century we had poets who were
genuinely public figures whose work was read fairly
widely. I'm talking about the likes of Byron,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman and so on. These were
fairly widely read by a general, literate
population.
With
modernism this seems to stop, poetry becoming more
difficult to interpret, less use of conventional
meter and rhyme and the use of more obscure
references. As an example I would suggest Pound's
Cantos, which are difficult and allusive,
containing references to chinese history and
philosophy, the troubadours, greek mythology,
Italian history and more. This isn't something a
"general" reader would get much enjoyment out of I
suspect.
There is
still a lot of poetry that is accessible to the
general reader though, just that the poetry most
praised by academia seems to be the more difficult
and obtuse.
Modern(ish)
poets I would recommend that I think are accessible
would be Larkin, Ted Hughes, Don Paterson and
Seamus Heaney, amongst others.
--- In
Literature@yahoogroups.com, "David Sigler"
<dasigler@...> wrote:
Most modern
poetry is crap and nothing more than a bunch of
words strung together to almost make a sentence or
point. I can't help but read todays poetry and get
the notion that the person is writing poetry not so
much to write good poetry but to sound like their
intellctual or socially aware of something. It
isn't poetry! It's crap and if one wants to write
about being social aware of things write
non-fiction! I literaly glaze over mentally when
reading todays poetry as it is so much social
commentary and just plain bad poetry without a
point. I don't expect a Shakespeares or a Keats or
a Wordsworth or any of those persons who actully
wrote poetry that one could call poetry. But it's
not poetry when all your getting is a social
commentary in pretty words and phrases and
cliches....okay, I'm done venting on the subject.
and to quote the Raven, Evermore!
david a
sigler
|