I was intrigued by this blurb for the Poetry Society's event this week with Lemn Sissay talking about the Liverpool Poets:

The highly popular ‘Under the Influence’ series, where one poet looks at the influence another poet has had on their work, continues in 2008 with an exciting new line up and venue.

As part of Liverpool 08, European Capital of Culture, poet Lemn Sissay will explain how reading The Mersey Sound by Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri made him realise poetry was for everyone and could be made up of many voices. Sissay’s own poems have been described as “the songs of the street, declamatory, imaginative, hard-hitting".

There's a sort of shorthand going on in this that I don't care for, which hits on class, education and race. I've seen such arguments put forward before and I resent them. As a young writer in the mid 80s, I too enjoyed reading Henri, Patten and McGough's work, but I identified it correctly as being an urban, middle-class genre which had little to do with 'the street' (whatever that was or is). It entertained and amused but it didn't speak to me as a working class teenager and it didn't chime with my experiences.

The idea that when poetry simplified its language in the 60s and 70s (in the UK and more widely), working class people nodded and felt included at last is an offensive fallacy still widely believed today. 'Poetry for the people', 'poetry for everyone', 'accessible poetry which the elitists won't like' - all these arguments are still being tiresomely played out.

Nothing proved to me that poetry is for everyone more than realising the depth of ideas which were there in poetry and the breadth of writers involved. There has long been an idea that working class, ethnic and other social groups can get into poetry only by being fed a watered down 'accessible', rusk poetry filled with humour and messages. The curriculum has long ago disappeared under this idea.

When my first book came out, my mother loaned it to our next door neighbour, a Glaswegian drunk turned bristling Presbyterian minister. His predictable moan was that one day I might 'write for the common man'. If I ever do, shoot me!

Wow, I've a lot to say about this, but I'm knackered at the moment, so I'll aim my caffeine psychosis this way in the morning. For now though the story about your neighbour reminds me of a quote by Sid Vicious when asked why he didn't make music for the man on the street- "I've met the man on the street- he's a c***!"

I also have quite a bit to say on this, and I really must go to bed. But I wonder if one of the reasons poetry repels so many people is not its inaccessibility but its lack, for the most part, of obvious technical difficulty. This is what the 'Why doesn't it rhyme?' brigade, whose understanding of poetry is generally very limited, are getting at really - the idea that poetry is a virtuosic use of language. And ironically, the more we simplify it and try to make accessible to everyone, the more we undermine that sense of specialness. If just anyone can do it, why should anyone want to? It's not a coincidence, I think, that poetry's popularity has declined steadily since the introduction of free verse. I love good free verse and hate bad formal verse, but I still have the vague feeling that poets should be looking for ways of restoring an element of technical discipline to their writing.

From my experience (and gut instinct), many of the perceived barriers to poetry are to do with marketing - the sheer lack of information about and access to poetry. There's a fine line between 'elite' and 'niche'.

Chris MacCabe had some interesting points to make on his blog:

Geoffrey Hill made the mistake, as a young poet,
of stating in his biog that his dad & grandad were
both village policemen. Critics have since made
much of this. Al Alvarez recently wrote in The
New York Review of Books that Hill had a
'Working Class upbringing' though most have
pitched it as 'Lower Middle Class'. As if there is
no difference. The connexion seems to be made
between the upbringing & 'difficulty' of his poetry
that Hill is somehow calling on his family history
in trying to police the language. Back we come
to the moralistic top of poetry as being about an
essential emotion or truth that should be commun
icated clearly & without obfuscation - that speed,
density & abstraction are an abomination of the art
and of our duty to relate as responsible human beings.
That the randomness & chaos of life should not be
reflected in poetry, but made clear sense of. That
the poet should 'have' something the reader can
'get' & any poet who doesn't is ruining the reputation
of poetry for those who do. The argument is similar
to how purists saw punk in relation to 'proper' music,
although whereas punk was seen as a vile working
class corruption, non-formulaic poetry is seen as
'bourgeois'. This subconscious assumption is a
perverted assault and is why a Salford barfly
such as Mark E. Smith bites into the neck of such
one-dimensional soothsayers. Only Shakespeare,
if he was alive after Logie Baird invented television,
could have described the transportational picture box,
like Smith does, as a "tragic lantern". This sense that
sense & order should be the premise of poetry - that
it shouldn't channel-hop or flick frames like TV does.
The term 'elitist', as Hill has objected, assumes that
the 'working class' are stupid - that they are cut-off
at the neck from enjoying the art of language. There
is no word that Hill could use that a working woman
could not use their time - if they wanted to - to find
out what it meant. The point is more to do with the
relevance of poetry in the pragmatics of someone's
life - backgrounds structurally obstruct working
class people from the same opportunities as the middle-
classes (this is a fact) - so the joy of the difficult poem
often finds no place in the grind of survival. Other
considerations are differing aesthetics - as with artists -
say a favouring for mimetic realism, for example, over
abstract expressionism. What is important is that the
poem itself - once cast off from the multiple subjectivity
of the poet - assumes nothing of the reader. It is just an
arrangement of words which cannot change the world
but can potentially bring pleasure to anyone who reads it.
Every poet has the right to stand by their conscious or
subconscious artistic decisions - all that is at risk is their
own readership. Which is their choice to make. Hill has
basically been accused of something close to criminality
- but so for critics - it is criminals that keep policemen in work


I generally agree with this - the whole "let's not give the working class anything difficult" thing is so bloody patronising!

When references/themes/language are too 'difficult' or obscure for me I just put them into google, look them up in the dictionary or ask someone else who might know. I'd assume most people do the same, unless they are fundamentally lazy or not interested in finding out, and from my experience laziness and apathy lack class allegiance.

Interesting piece from Chris - though it's largely concerned with a subtly different subject which is how style and genre and class meet up, as opposed to the accessibility of poetry in general. With that in mind, it's interesting to note how working class poets are assumed to have undergone class conversion in order to find the ability to write, or they are reassessed after choosing a soft-handed profession in the arts or academy, as when Paul Farley was recently described by the critic Jeremy Noel-Tod as 'a working-class boy who finds himself middle-class in middle age, thanks to an interest in poetry'.

Interesting too to see Chris say that 'non-formulaic poetry is seen as 'bourgeois''. This is a problematic word for me, because it is rarely used in its dictionary sense, as a synonym for 'middle class', and much more so as a term meaning 'relating to the affectations of the middle classes'. In this latter sense, I think I'd link it to our Scots word 'couthy', meaning amiably homespun, cosily domestic, which is a fair description of a large amount of poetry written by working class people over the centuries, work which cannot be seen as wholly in-class, influenced as it is as much by church as by the oral tradition. I'd say that there are also strands of poetry (both formulaic and non-formulaic, if we can for the time being use those dubious terms) which can be identified as 'bourgeois'.

A few vaguely related points:

I don't think the criticism of poetry as 'inaccessible' is only made by reference to working class or 'ordinary' people. Most middle class people have the same problem with it, and the same beef with a perceived 'elite'.

Feel like this doesn't quite nail it. You mentioned 'obvious technical difficulty' but is rhyming really perceived as particularly clever or virtuoso? I would expect that most people who complain about free verse being 'chopped prose' are just as likely to say that Pam Ayres or your average rhyme-happy slam poet/rapper are 'not real poets'.

Personally, I don't think poetry should have to answer to that attitude at all. The 'why doesn't it rhyme' brigade have simply been taught, at an early age, to respect a very limited, specific range of poetry as being all there is to poetry and will reject anything outside of that range, whether it simply doesn't rhyme or it's not done with the requisite pomp.

Selling a poet's work as being 'of the street' or for 'everyman' strikes me as just that - selling. It's just targeting a particular kind of person who thinks of themselves as being ordinary or cut out from nepotistic circles of power, which can just as easily be the lower middle class as the working class, and saying: "This is YOUR kind of thing."

In the absence of any solid evidence one way or the other, we'll probably have to agree to differ on this one. My impression is that the people I'm talking about think rhyme is quite difficult and impressive and are delighted when they manage it themselves. There is another tendency, slightly more sophisticated, that thinks of rhyme and all formal elements as a vulgar error.

Not to take the thread too off topic, but Accessibility and Poetry for everyone has come up recently with my podcast - from the point of view of disability - I've been asked to make changes to the way I present my podcast so that I am being inclusive.

Simply, and to comply with legislation, I need to make an accessibility statement for the show, make some changes to the way images are shown, and provide written information where I can.

How much of our poetry is being made accessible for all? How far do I go to be compliant with legislation?

I don't know.

As for class - is there a comparison with American poetry - where class as we know it is more meritocratic than to do with old land owners (sweeping statement I know), is American poetry seen as more Poetry For Everyone than our own is?

No answers here- just want to throw more questions into the pot!

Dom

Dom, poetry IS for everyone. Clearly it isn't for people who can't read. Or people who don't like reading. Or people who prefer chick lit. Or people who don't want to read anything hard. Or people who think you shouldn't be too clever.

Poetry is NOT about "class." It just ISN'T. Long-gone are the days when only the toffs got an education, & you needed that touch of Latin and Greek to be able to understand what was going on.

Then again, it's a good hundred years since it became relatively easy for any working-class oik to go learn some Greek & Latin. I mean, knowledge is all around us. Anyone who insists on nothing being pitched above their own level of knowledge is just asking to be pandered to, refusing to stretch themselves, and really just putting their own ignorance on display. It's asinine. Part of what ANY reading is all about is learning new stuff, and having to figure out what's going on - and wait, it's even worse than that, it's just intolerance of other people knowing things you don't. I simply don't buy into this idea of "elitism," anyway, what is it?? Most poets are not upper class or even upper-middle. They're just people. Ezra Pound was from Idaho, TS Eliot's parents were furious, he was a lowly clerk in a bank for God's sake! Living in a basement flat!

Even Harry Potter, when they published it in America, they edited it into Americanese - so that Hogwarts becomes a "high school," etc - as if the little little American kids couldn't possibly understand any English terminology, it would scare them too much... a whole generation growing up thinking theirs is the only way of doing anything - no outside world at all...

Sorry, I know this is a rant! As for accessibility, that's a different thing, but if someone's making podcasts... surely it is based on the audience having the ability to hear? I mean, it's an aural medium? Is it like not being allowed to publish a book unless it's simultaneously made available in Braille? Will the accessibility legislation make it, eventually, illegal to use subtle colour combinations?

Oh, ARGH.

/pedantic mode

My problem has been with Blind and Deaf users of my site - because they can't read the page - or can't hear the recordings I've had a brush with the Disability Discrimination Act (It doesn't apply to me - but it would to 'proper' publishers)

I presume you mean people who don't want to read - rather than those who are physically unable to read due to disability

/ end pedantic mode

I'm not sure if I'm adding anything to the argument - but as a comparison (and seeing as you talk about subtle colour changes being banned) the DDA is not about making a homogenous society, a one size fits all, but asks that people, when asked to do so, make reasonable adjustments to allow others to participate in society.

Now, when put like that, surely, if asked to make a poem more acceptable/understandable/accessible to one particular group, then is it not reasonable to do so. Say, one of Roddy's native Scottish dialect poems - is it not reasonable that I ask for a translation, to make it more understandable for me, I'm not asking for the Original to be changed or altered, just a version that I can understand. In much the same way the Harry Potter is 'translated' for the states, and in the same way that is it translated into French, Thai, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Braille, Esperanto et al. the translations are never literal translations, but reasonable translations that carry the meaning. I'm thinking here of teachers names being change, in the same manner that the characters in Asterix have their names changed for whichever language they are being printed in (Dogmatix being an obvious one that works in English, but not in it's native French)

Poetry can't be exempt from an inclusive society.

Oh yes it is - how do you rationalise Chris's statement that "The point is more to do with the relevance of poetry in the pragmatics of someone's life - backgrounds structurally obstruct working class people from the same opportunities as the middle-classes (this is a fact)". It's important to note that Chris isn't (I think) claiming oppression here from other classes but noting the broader problems of the class system in general.

This is particularly a problem in England, where poetry is still continuously tainted with the stigma of sissydom (for boys) and dreamerdom (for girls), in all classes but especially the working class. The so-called 'Celtic' countries have less of a stigma in this respect (as do the Brit African-Caribbean cultures). This problem becomes clear to anyone who works with poetry for more than a day or two in schools.

I know you all love to hear stats about my anthology :D so here's another: I showed my list of poets to a fellow poet recently - one of the things we did out of interest was look through it for the number of poets from working class backgrounds. We could identify only a dozen or so, from 75 poets involved.

As ever with things American and poetry, the whole is too huge to make anything but generalisations, but my gut feeling is that American poetry fits more with the model of the less common Euro language countries, for example Portugal and Denmark, even Germany to some extent.

A good example is Dutch poetry as I understand it (I'm no expert but have had it explained to me by two Dutch writers): with a limited number of Dutch speakers, the country cannot sustain a vibrant, wide-ranging poetry publishing scene, and so poetry publishing becomes spilt between 'folksy' poetry which sells to the hoi van der polloi and 'intellectual' poetry which does most of its business via academia. There is much less of a mainstream in such countries! In the US this is replicated to some extent with a number of popular poets such as Oliver, Dove, Hoagland and Collins who have a public profile and 'state poets', those whose work is popular within a certain area. Meanwhile, most of the other poets seek genre or academic acclaim - being led to write largely for other poets.

Excuse shorthand and simplification - this would make a good essay subject for PR.

Dom, clearly I agree that people with visual and/or hearing impediments have a right to be able to access poetry. I've had eye trouble myself, I appreciate different formats. What I'm disputing is that everybody ought to be able to access everything everywhere. People are different, and no amount of "inclusivity" will make it not so. My point was that once you put the onus on everybody to be "accessible" to everybody else, the logical endpoint is that no one can do anything, because someone somewhere can always, & no doubt will, say he is "excluded."

I think you may have missed my point about the "translation" (we're one language, or has something changed?) of Harry Potter: it was ridiculous, insulting to England (not important enough to make the effort of understanding?) and a gross disservice to the American kids, who are reinforced in their ignorance of anything outside American culture. And why should any reader be handed anything on a plate? Sure, ask for a "translation" of someone's Scottish poem. But equally, you can go to the library or onto the Web and find out about Scots yourself, or you could try and work it out, or you could realise that not everything is about you and go find something you do understand. Don't for God's sake dare to feel "excluded" by it! Sorry, that drives me nuts. It's the mediocracy.
:takes deep breaths:

Roddy, the issues you highlight have their origins within culture, not poetry.

(Edited in. I think there is a much wider debate to be had around poetry, or any kind of art, and class.Traditional forms have died away and we are left with a working class which has got used to being thrown sops like Big Brother etc - I don't seem much mass entertainment that's any more edifying than that. The working class once used to set up choirs and bands and go listen to lectures... & music hall is about a thousand times more vibrant than reality TV...)

Poetry has ALWAYS been "cissy," There are some great cartoons on the subject. But that doesn't make it not "inclusive"! The great thing is that there is all different kinds of stuff, and people can find something that suits them. And I'm all for radically changing the way poetry's taught in schools. I'm huge in favour of kids growing up writing, & grownups reading - or reciting - or listening. What I'm objecting to is this feeling that people somehow need to be spoon-fed, that it's wrong to expect them to rise to a challenge. You know, Don Share has a great quote from Paul Valery on his blog: "It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort."

Intellectual activity takes effort. Some of us find it pleasant. And the ones who don't? Fine. But don't pretend it's the same thing. You may as well complain of "elitist" footballers who excluded us by practising till they were better than everyone else.

Sorry. Ranting again.

I found this as part of the opening page of Smokestack books. It's interesting, that an organisation that talks of being "radical" seems to want its poetry "accessible" and seems to think that there is something wrong with difficulty in itself.

Now, I've no doubt that difficulty can sometimes be a bad thing, especially when it veers off into obscurity. It can be a way of pretending to be clever. But the kind of poetry they seem to be advocating is a kind of agit-prop poetry that wears its opinions on the surface, and basically isn't that much different from Rudyard Kipling's If: some bloke giving someone the benefit of his opinion about how to live, or about George Bush and capitalism...

And what does it mean to say that poetry belongs to everyone? That it always has to pander to a percieved notion of a working man/woman's attention span? What's wrong with making people think, or giving people an unfamiliar experience of language that actually challenges them? It's actually patronising and insulting to the working-class (and anyone else, actually) to treat us as people who need to be spoonfed. I've got a great deal of sympathy for radical politics; but this lowest common denominator thinking just makes me furious.

I sort of share your feelings on this - it certainly seems frustratingly dismissive to file poets as 'middle class', a term that has no positive connotations whatsoever and has come to imply a certain out of touchedness. However, Luke Kennard says in his notes to The Solex Brothers:

"I've heard several people say 'What's wrong with being elitist?' in public forums and go on to define 'elite' as simply referring to the best example of a given thing - which I think sort of misses the point; it's more about where you're looking for those examples."

Well, exactly. The problem with elitism is it's tied up in prejudice, and the complaint of elitism in poetry is that it's created with a higher-educated audience strongly in mind. There's a difference between making a learned reference because it's appropriate and/or interesting and making it in order to win points with the audience you envisage. There's a difference between genuinely setting out to explore the extreme possibilities of language and eschewing friendly devices like narrative and rhyme because they're too everyday.

I'm not saying I wholly agree with that complaint, but that's what I understand it to be, that poets who say that class has nothing to do with it are simply not admitting that they write to be rated and recognised by (over?)educated people, with little concern to how a more general audience might struggle to comprehend what they say.

The other aspect of that is it's all very well to write what you damn well please, but what does an audience owe to you exactly if understanding your allusions requires researching things on wikipedia? You go ahead, but don't complain that people aren't paying you enough attention.

Sounds like a have your cake and eat it case, except that the two words have been so hammered into near-meaninglessness by overuse. Also, both stem from an over exaggerated concern with poetry's 'place' in society. 'Radical' is meant to denote the same thing as 'avante garde' does literally - leading our culture in a bold new direction - while 'accessible' is supposed to imply that the work is rooted in our lives, relevant to everyone again. Again and again, poetry is sold by reference to its currency as a cultural artifact, so of course 'difficulty' is perceived as the enemy, because that implies the question of who we are and where we are going is a difficult one, when we'd all much rather it was simple to grasp.

I agree with you here, Matthew. Aside from rhyme, another marker technical skill is the pitch of the rhetoric. Lots of the poetry of the last sixty years seems to have been governed by the idea that even ornate formal arrangements should be disguised through the use of colloquial idiom. Larkin's a good example - those rhyme schemes which a casual listener may not notice, because of the lineation, tone etc. Larkin's great (with or without a capital G as you please), but poets too often seem suspicious of the idea that high rhetoric is also OK - it is poetry after all. And I wonder if the 'general public's indifference to much modern poetry stems from the fact that it doesn't sound like poetry - isn't high-falutin, difficult in a 'how shall I parse this' as opposed to a 'what the hell does the poet mean?' kind of a way.

This morning by chance I was reading Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind', and thrilled to the bit where he talks about how
the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill

- specifically the way the conjunctions 'hues and odours' and 'plain and hill' are run up against each other despite their completely different syntactic roles, causing (in me at least) a sort of brain-fever which first reads the four things as a list, then wants to treat 'plain' as an adjective modifying 'hues and odours' or maybe just 'odours', before finally going back (across that whole-line parenthesis which deliberately exacerbates the confusion) to figure out that the plain and hill are being filled with the hues and odours. It isn't 'accessible', but, you know, horses for courses.
Poetry should be allowed to be grand, and I think a lot of people don't hear modern poetry (when they hear it at all) as grand.

Nothing should ever be written for everyone. It's a betrayal of the reader. I mean, everyone reads on their own, listens on their own. There's no such thing as two people that are the same or something that means the same thing to two people.

It's up to teachers to do their job. If they can find nothing worth teaching or noone to listen then poets should write for themselves* until someone bothers to listen again.

*or blog, or chatter on forums

The Spelling

I left a spelling at my father's house
written in small coins on his front step.
It said which star I was heading for next,
which channel to watch, which button to press.
I should have waited, given that spelling
a voice, but I was handsome and late.

While I was gone he replied with pebbles
and leaves at my gate. But a storm got up
from the west, sluicing all meaning and shape.

I keep his broken spelling in a tin,
tip it out on the cellar floor, hoping
a letter or even a word might form.
And I am all grief, staring through black space
to meet his eyes, trying to read his face.


A modern poem with a fairly high rhetorical pitching - the use of "handsome" in l.6, the phrase "And I am all grief", the emphatic closure of the full end-rhymed couplet. The writer? Simon Armitage, vigorously applauded for his language created from "slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon and the vernacular of his native northern England" (I'm reading off the flyleaf to his Selected). I actually think that those poems of his that do try to "get down with the kids" are often his least successful - eg. "The Stuff" from "Zoom!", which includes among other things the word "twaddle", surely not part of the youth argot since 1658. His best poems may carry flavours of the idiomatic but are always clearly poetic. The other thing about SA is that he is one of those poets who is called "working class" (even though I don't think he identifies himself as such), largely - I suspect - because he's northern and doesn't have an RP accent.

I'm saying two things here. Firstly, I think that the heightened pitch is alive and well in modern poetry. I disagree that Larkin was a poet who shied away from formality, in terms of smuggling it in under colloquial idiom - "Church Going" is a good example of Larkin steadily (but subtly) lifting the pitch until he hits the gas pedal full on in the last few lines. I wonder if it's possible to write a poem at all without some heightening, however minimal - the very nature of poetry automatically draws attention to the structure and use of language in a way that prose / reported speech etc. may do but doesn't have to. Secondly, I think that the issue of class is very strongly relevant to poetry, but more to those people wanting to carve out territories than to the actual writers themselves. So the conflation of "working class / street" with the loosely-defined term "accessible" is a way to try and rally the support of funding bodies under the inclusivity flag in an attack on those academics (usually middle-class) who set themselves up as arbiters of the canon. Of course, we don't need Michael Schmidt telling us what qualifies as good poetry, but equally we don't need people trying to persuade us that poetry is somehow "for everyone", when it quite clearly isn't, nor should be.

Hampton Court maze is "accessible". But it's neither easy nor to everyone's taste as a way to spend an afternoon...

Hmm. Actually I think it's the *complaint* of elitism that's tied up in prejudice. It's the so-called elitism itself that creates poetry with an educated audience in mind.

But so what! I create poetry with the poem in mind. I use my own mind. I'm not going to bend my mind into the shape of what I perceive to be the shape of some inchoate group of people's minds, little as they may be known to me... Er - and if I did that, I'd be trying to win points with a group of people I'd be envisaging!

And here's something. I say class isn't the main point. It's about education. I know all about the shortfalls of the education system, trust me - I'm the child of two teachers and my third kid is going into her GCSEs - but culturally we have backslid. It's well over a hundred years since every kid got a free education. There used to be huge idealism around that, but now it's completely dissipated - even the teachers don't know grammar - & basically it doesn't take much to seem elitist in that climate. The rate of functional illiteracy is higher now than it was in 1912.

Yeah, I write for a relatively educated audience. Lots of people who aren't terribly literary have said they liked my poems, but that wasn't why I wrote them like that - it was even better than that, I was actually being genuine (note re the other thread - this is not the same as being earnest!). I think if you're honest, you're fine. And even if I were writing academic poetry for academics, if the academics liked it there'd be nothing wrong with that. It's not a MORAL quality, is what I'm saying. It should be about the art.

If I were sitting with a pen in my hand, trying to write a poem with "a general audience" in mind, getting down with the man in the street or whatever, pretending I was thinking something other than what I'm really thinking, I'd be dishonest and cynical and would deserve to burn in the flames of obscurity forevermore.

And I've always liked to read Geoffrey Hill. I liked him when I was a 22-year-old girl working in a bookshop. I don't have a degree. I know people who read him who don't write, but they do tend to be older - they were raised in a different culture.

Amongst the people I know who are not poets, there is a fairly low tolerance for 'difficult' poetry. That is to say, some of them might read 'The World's Wife', or 'Staying Alive', but give them a volume of Geoffrey Hill's poems, or even Eliot, and their eyes glaze over.

I think it's hard to keep a sense of perspective when you hang out a lot with other obsessives who love de-coding and getting stuck into less accessible poetry. In my experience, non-poets aren't interested in putting in the graft to really dig into a poem that doesn't say something fairly clear at the outset. Anyone who stays the course, really trying to get to grips a lot of the more obscure contemporary poetry, usually ends up writing it themselves. That's why a large percentage of most audiences at readings are also poets. There's nothing wrong with this situation, unless you really want to widen the poetry audience.

Alive and well, yes, but too often having to cough an apology for turning up.

No argument about this. In any case it was foolish of me to choose such a popular poet as an example. But you're right also that Larkin works subtly, and, notwithstanding Larkin's own popularity, I wonder if non-poetry readers who may not be alive to subtle gradations of language may respond better to grand gestures.

Of course a Hallmark card is the grandest gesture of all, in a terrifying late-Roman cymbals-and-tigers kind of way.

Geoffrey Hill is an interesting test case here. I wonder how he is perceived by the various groups - probably deeply unattractive to the 'poetry for everyone' types, but it seems to me he's the poet most often liked by people who usually read literature other than modern poetry. Because it seems like 'proper' poetry - 'profound'?

Is there room in the market for a Hillmark card?

Can one be "over-educated?"

And what exactly is "a more general audience"?

While I suspect part of writing is that we all like to be admired, I don't think that's why we do it. Mostly, I suspect most of us are scratching wherever the itch is. If it happens to be in the direction of difficulty then so be it.

But then I often find that difficulty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of ostensibly "difficult" poetry isn't nearly as difficult as it seems to be.

Steven,

I used the term '(over?) educated' as a reference to the argument (not entirely dubious) that too much academia can warp a person's sense of perspective and lead to unjustified intellectual arrogance. There's certainly such a thing as over-intellectualising something and the argument would be that the 'over educated' are prone to this.

By 'a more general audience', I mean people outside of existing academic and poetry circles. While I think there's nothing wrong with intellectualism per se, I do think it's somewhat naive to think that anyone (or even the majority of people) could/should easily make room for it in their lives if they only had the gumption. It's only one route to meaning and understanding, after all.

I don't think that's *why* we do it, but poets don't write in a social vacuum. I expect most of them have an eye towards who is going to read and assess their work, evaluate their achievement, and I think it's highly likely that most have a relatively intellectual audience in mind, while relatively few break a sweat over what a builder or a call centre operative might make of their work.

As to difficulty being in the eye of the beholder ... well, it's rather like 'quality', isn't it? The idea has some currency, but we generally think (or hope) that there is something concrete, that you can't just say 'people like what they like' and leave it at that. At least, we behave as if that were the case.

At least, we behave as if that were the case.

Well, yes we do, but it gets rather hard to pin down what exactly "quality" is the closer you get to it. I mean, how does one judge a Bob Cobbing poem? He has his champions, but he's not as obviously "quality" as Seamus Heaney, mainly because he's taken away all the signposts that tell you this is a "quality poem". The further one goes from the mainstream, the more difficult it becomes.

As someone who enjoys some rather raucous free jazz, a lot of abstract expressionist art, and the kind of poetry that would make neo-formalist toes curl, I have to say that questions of "quality" are not things that concern me much, because there's so many different kinds of quality. John Coltrane heading for outer space in his half-hour version of "My Favourite Things" can hardly be judged with the same criteria as the latest Madonna album!

"It must give pleasure" is the only criterion of quality that actually makes any sense to me. But I still think that Pam Ayres (bless her!) is crap. So I'm acting as if I know what quality is, when I don't really know at all. It's something to do with the kind of pleasure it gives - its resonance, its depths, the way it strikes the part of me that is looking for surprise. But that's me applying my criteria, and are my criteria any more objective than the fans of Pam Ayres? I doubt it...

As for unjustified intellectual arrogance - most of the time when I talk to non-mainstream poets, I see and hear a lot of the same things that happen to me. Yes, they do have an audience in mind - and so does everybody - but I don't see intellectualism. I see a bunch of people dealing with problems in their poetry the best way they can.

And I do mean it about things not always being as difficult as they seem - a poem by Geraldine Monk, say, or Kelvin Corcoran, doesn't seem much more difficult than your average mainstream poet. It sometimes takes a slightly different reading strategy (don't read Ashbery poems for a straightforward narrative, for instance), but considering the fact that we live in a world of soundbites, txt language, advertising and the like, it's not that difficult to decipher. Heck, your average Talking Heads song is constructed in a similar way!

I'm not sure I could even go along with "it must give pleasure". It's fairly ordinary, for instance, for it to be claimed that a piece of art 'disturbs', 'shocks' or induces other fairly negative reactions, with the implication that this denotes quality.

Probably not a good idea to get too deep into that. I just threw it up as the obvious area where there is an assumption of objective (or at least not entirely subjective) truth - or else why bother with reviews, or even with the claim of quality? - but where we struggle to define what the criteria really is and frequently come back to the old 'eye of the beholder' idea. I suppose you could say there's a similar situation with the concept of 'difficulty'. But I'm not entirely convinced. The writing of someone like, say, Celan, is surely far more cryptic than a soundbite or text, or even a Talking Heads lyric, I would venture. I think we could all agree to some extent on whether a poem falls into one of three categories: 1) something pretty much every literate person can form a literal understanding of, 2) something manageable for people with a real interest in contemporary poetry, but which would resist someone uninterested in it, and 3) something which is plainly intended to be difficult, cryptic, wothaveyou, even to regular readers of poetry.

Having said that, I'm sure people can find exceptions!

I don't have any particular criticism of poetry that falls into the third category, but I find myself very put off by claims of 'properness' either way, whether it's an experimental/avant poet suggesting that what they do is far more ambitious or appropriate, or someone saying that any poetry 'the man in the street' cannot immediately comprehend has limited purpose or relevance. The latter always seems to me to be implied when publishers make their slightly spurious claims of 'accessibility'.

Celan's an interesting example, isn't he? I do wonder in what sense he "intended" to be difficult, or if the difficulty comes from the things he felt he had to write about - the "unsayable" - there's something driven about his poems. And I agree with your categories, though as I say, some that is proclaimed or rejected as such is not.

I think there is about the best poetry (for me, at least): whether it's accessible or not. I don't that the difficult poets I like do so because they're trying to impress anyone - though I could be wrong. Neither do I think that difficulty is a virtue in itself - if it doesn't come out of necessity, it probably shouldn't come at all.

As for the lit-crit speak of "disturbing", "shocking" etc, I suspect that's all it is. I've been reading poems about slavery, Katrina, racial violence by DS Marriot recently - and "enjoyable" they certainly are, despite their somewhat grim subject matter. After all, we enjoy a good Shakespearean tragedy.

I'm off to the Isle of Arran for a week. See you later!

We seem to have veered off into a discussion of language-based inaccessibility, but another type of difficulty, which would clearly fall into your first category, Jon, is that of frames of reference.

Like as with the current taboo on the trope of writing about the Classics - which, btw, I write about anyway - you know, we've all been in a workshop where someone gets jumped on for mentioning something the people in the group didn't know about. One case that springs to mind was a screamingly funny poem about an adolescent love triangle during a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where people said it "didn't work" or "excluded them" because they didn't klnow the story of A Midsummer Night's Dream! No, srsly. And the poem did in fact work, even without that particular layer, because it was a funny story.

This thing irritates me more than almost anything - it's like you aren't even entitled to the use of the contents of your own head. If you argue that to be educated, to know things, is to be "elitist," you are condemning yourself and everyone else to a life of undifferentiated sludge.

All you can do is write yourself, write as you need to; it is for your critics and readers to decide if you're interesting or not. From that point of view the crucial thing is whether you're able to publish, or find a workshop to be in, or read at gigs, and get your work out there.

Ultimately, as the American poet William Jay Smith says in thie month's Contemporary Poetry Review (www.cprw.com), "Robert Graves said once that a poet writes poems for his friends, and I agree. And he also writes criticism for those same friends."

Funny that Celan came up here - I posted him on my blog the other day, reading his poem Todesfuge, precisely in reference to this issue - my argument being that his rhetorical devices and reading style render him accessible on an emotional level even though he's in the original German.

Ah well. I mean, the world is our fishpond, isn't it! And especially with Web 2.0. Sigh.

On the question of whether or not people intend to be difficult or are out to impress, I find myself split between what seems like good faith and what seems like reasonable cynicism. Since Celan was a holocaust survivor and a suicide, I'm just about prepared to entertain the idea that he genuinely couldn't find any more direct or conventional way to write about whatever he was writing about.

But if any poet without serious survivor-credentials wrote something like this -

"Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it."

- I would think it posturing, to put it mildly. Maybe there's a translation issue here too. Certainly though, I think there are plentiful instances in contemporary poetry of people trying to be intellectual for the sake of being intellectual, in the criticism as well as the poetry. Here is David Wheatley (who seems to be a member of these forums!) on Sam Gardiner:

"Where his contemporary Derek Mahon gravitates to romantic outsiders, in Gardiner the condition of cosmic unhousedness has come home to roost in even the most obdurate-seeming bourgeois surroundings."

And here's Fiona Sampson on Marhmoud Darwish:

"The existence of alternatives is not merely desirable but necessary: both philosophical and political fact. A sense of intrinsic mutability becomes not the fear of death, but an engine for survival."

It's going to take some convincing for me to accept that these critics (who are also poets) aren't straining for intellectual flair at the expense of transparency in these instances. And although the line is blurred very often, the same thing is afoot in poetry. How often do you think the word 'Sanskrit' is dropped into a poem by poets who have only the vaguest idea of what it is? How many perhaps because they've seen it used in other poems? Not saying there should be any law against that but why does it happen?

I'm not sure it's so much about impressing people as coming up to a perceived standard. Am I wrong in thinking that many (or most, if you like) contemporary poets write and behave as if there is an expectation, from some quarters at least, that they are educated in poetry, literary criticism and some other aspects of high culture? If that were the case, that's where elitism comes in - the door seeming to be shut to anyone who hasn't taken a lit course.

Ron Silliman wrote something in his blog yesterday which I think is pertinent to the question:

"I have always – even as a teenager – been interested in what the troubadours called trobar clus, that writing they reserved for their best readers / listeners, themselves ..."

I have no problem with poets writing inaccessible stuff, as long as I quickly get the idea that I am not part of the target audience for a particular poem, or type of poetry. What does annoy me is being told that the poetry I can't access (as in 'have no great interest in accessing because it would take too much time and effort on my part') is the lodestone of "good poetry", that to attempt to write poetry in any other shape or form is effectively not "good poetry".

There is no single form of good poetry just as there's no single form of accessible poetry. Indeed, very different poems can be very good and very accessible at the same time. The fun is in the arguments about which poems meet those very subjective criteria.

I'm also reminded that lots of people get great enjoyment out of doing cryptic crosswords - they're not my cup of tea, but I don't feel the need to go round labelling the cryptic-crosswordists "elitist" for their choice of entertainment (as long as they don't go round calling me stupid or weak minded for my disinterest in that sort of puzzle, of course). Horses for courses, etc, etc.

Not to negate your point Jon (David will be along to do that in a minute! :lol: ), but here is a sampling of current UK poets who (I believe) didn't take a lit course:

Matthew Caley
David Constantine
Julia Copus
Don Paterson
Selima Hill
Gerard Woodward
Paul Farley
Chris McCabe
Nick Laird
John Burnside
David Morley
George Szirtes
Simon Armitage
John Stammers
Peter Reading
Peter Didsbury
Neil Rollinson
Hugo Williams
Wendy Cope
Kathleen Jamie
Liz Lochhead
Carol Ann Duffy
Me

What is this "survivor credentials" thing? What, you have to have gone through a genocide before you can write in language that isn't "direct or conventional"? Puh-lease. Suffering never made anybody noble and it doesn't earn you anything - I think that's the real lesson of the twentieth century, unfortunately.

And people do go through their own little private holocausts, and some of those holocausts don't look like much from the outside. All it earns you is knowledge, and not always the knowledge you'd like to have. Celan knew things he didn't want to have to know. Eventually he killed himself. But when he was writing he emphatically wasn't "a suicide". He was still alive. Or did he retroactively earn the right to write as he did? Eh? Suicide is a disaster that happens to some people, it isn't something that defines them throughout their lives.

The definition of pretension is that someone is trying to be something they aren't. It isn't genuine. If it's genuine then by definition it isn't pretension. One person's intellectual snobbery is another person's simple intellectualism.

If I'm not mistaken, Fiona Sampson studied philosophy. That'll be why she's writing with a philosopher's hair-splitting care for definition of terms. It may not be great criticism, but it's not pretension.

A reminder: it's just as possible to be pretentiously lowbrow as it is to be pretentiously highbrow. And hokum is always hokum no matter who's doing it.

Add me to Roddy's list. No degree whatsoever, I'm afraid.

Quite a flippant phrase, but what I mean is that there are experiences I can't imagine going through and have no understanding of. I make some allowance therefore for the fact that such experiences might change people to the point where seemingly pretentious pronouncements are genuine. I make an allowance for them being 'different' in that respect. What makes 'angst' poetry so bad, on the other hand, is that we suspect we have been through the same emotions and therefore chalk up all the razor blades and blood stuff to melodrama. It's not that it's insincere; it's that it's self-indulgent.

Yes, the suicide is retrospective authentication of a kind. If someone moans about things all the time, you might not take them seriously. If they moan about things all the time and then kill themselves, you might realise that you should have taken them seriously, to be blunt. I like Celan's poetry anyway and I don't think I'd like it any less if he had been mentally healthy all his life, but I would find it very, very difficult to take a pronouncement about 'the thousand darknesses of murderous speech' seriously if it had come from someone of, say, my background.

Well, I disagree. I don't think, for one thing, there's quite the dichotomy of genuine and pretentious you're suggesting. Indulgence, self or otherwise, can be utterly genuine. You say: "The definition of pretension is that someone is trying to be something they aren't." But why shouldn't we try to be something we aren't? Isn't that how we change? Doesn't every reviewer try to an adopt a similar tone of authority, no matter what authority or experience they may have? Don't poets try out different voices, try to ascertain what kind of poet they want to be and then try to be that kind of poet? Don't people in general try to be the kind of person they want to be, even if it's not what are? Perhaps too philosophical a question.

But for me, pretension can be when a high resister is used inappropriately. Why? Because the language becomes an affectation. It also comes in, I think, when intellectual discovery is attempted for the sake of it, ie. when I feel the author has set out to try to be as intellectual as possible, rather than trying to weigh what sort of response the subject demands, and so steps into Emperor's New Clothes territory. Maybe that's not the dictionary definition, but it's a meaning that's common currency, hence Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner. I imagine it's the case that this is so much down to judgment that whatever you or I call out as being 'pretentious', the author or their supporters will say: "No, no, thoughtful and meticulous."

I don't agree that 'hokum is always hokum' either. It does depend on who's saying it, and in what context - obviously so when it's by reference to the person themselves, as the Celan extract is. And finally, unfortunately I don't need a reminder that it's possible to be pretentiously lowbrow. I've been subjected to plenty of that kind of snobbery myself and have found myself at the other end of this debate on a number of occasions. Serves me right for seeing both sides.

Well, you'll appreciate that as someone who has taken a lit course (and a creative writing minor at that) I was never wholly adopting the view that it created an unfair advantage. I think I may have veered off course a little, but I was trying to get at the idea that an impression was created - by certain norms in poetry criticism and poetry itself - that the highbrow is favoured and more greatly respected, certainly by comparison to mediums like film and music. Surely the likes of Hugo Williams and David Constantine don't count as lesser educated?

Back to the beginning of the thread… In the nature of an aside…

Roddy started this thread with Lemn Sissay’s remarks on Henri, Patten and McGough. In 1967 when Henri published The Mersey Sound and Patten’s Little Johnny's Confession appeared and Edward Lucie-Smith edited for Rapp and Carroll The Liverpool Scene, I was twenty-two years old. I went to school in Liverpool; I went to university in Liverpool; I continued to live and work there until 1980, teaching in secondary schools in the inner city and the inner-city fringe. Whatever the impact of these three writers in the 1980s, I can vouch from experience that in the case of McGough and Patten their lines did “speak” to my almost exclusively working-class pupils. They were fascinated both by the poems themselves, particularly those of Patten and McGough – Henri always went down less well – and by the idea that a published poet should have emerged in their city. No doubt things were different in the 1980s – and different in a different city, too.

It is worth understanding that Henri, Patten and McGough were not the only poetic show in town. At the more consciously literary end of the spectrum was the University Poetry Society. In the winter of 1966-67 this organized the first readings that Heaney, Mahon and Longley had given outside Northern Ireland. The Society had personal and strong links at that time to Harry Chambers and his nascent Peterloo Press. Members included Veronica Forrest-Thompson and David Selzer, a Gregory Award winner in 1967, the same year as Angus Calder, Marcus Cumberlege, David Harsent – and Brian Patten. Then there were more populist writers, of whom Henri, Patten and McGough are perhaps the only ones remembered now. But these were not writing in isolation. There was the work of Harold Hikins (with several others) in setting up readings. These were at first small-scale and held in local pubs, but it was out of this that the 1968 Festival of a Hundred Poets was mounted. (I was one of the hundred.) In modified form, the festival was repeated annually for a number of years. The event in 1968 in which I played a minor role was very well attended; others in which I was merely among the audience were even better attended. These certainly did not feel like “middle-class” occasions, nor, I think, did we feel we were being condescended to in any way. Helpfully, these activities were picked up in the local media. From the late 1960s on into the 1970s, for example, Radio Merseyside, through its schools outreach service, promoted young local writers. There was a genuine buzz, I think.

But all this strictly poetic activity needs to be seen in the context created by popular music in two forms that were very lively in Liverpool in the 1960s: folk music and rock. There were many venues for folk music at the time, all, as far as I can recall now, in pubs. (The one my friends and I generally frequented was Gregory’s Well.) And of course, as for rock, The Beatles were only the most celebrated product of the city’s musical scene.

Finally, it important to realize how much overlap there was among these various groups. As an undergrad and then a post-grad at the university, I, like my friends, went to musical events, sang folk songs at Gregory’s Well, gave readings, subscribed to Underdog, the magazine Brian Patten ran from 1962 to 1966; and a little later worked with Harold Hikins and Radio Merseyside. Adrian Henri had a flat close to the university (in Faulkner Square?), and certainly at least one of my university acquaintances was a friend of his and visited him there. On a more personal note, I “inherited” a girl-friend from Brian Patten….

What the causes of this cultural ferment were, I cannot say; nor, having left Merseyside in 1980, can I comment on how things are now.

Clive Watkins

*snip*

Just tidying some off-thread stuff.

Hello can I go on with this a minute? I've not posted before so I read the entire thread before realising you've all gone home.
Until yesterday I absolutely agreed with KEB that it's not about class any more - that most people now have access to whatever learning they might lean towards to get whatever they like out of poetry. I know I write what I write and have given up guessing who I'm likely to appeal to. I've had pretty gratifying comments after readings from very unexpected sources - and I've had a kind of dead frog reaction from reading to safe-houses.
Thing is, it seems to me that contradictory things are happening now - in that people tend to have individual access to what ever they are looking for in terms of music, poetry, interior decorating etc etc but that markets are more and more geared to mass appeal, and that mass appeal demands market research which demands tick boxes and definitions, which in turn gives us lowest common denominators and the idiot guide to social stereotyping . So my son happily steals a deeply eclectic music collection transcending every cultural barrier you can think of whilst I stick on the telly for spoon fed pap. Point being that it doesn't have to be about class anymore. It really doesn't. And then it is.

"Where his contemporary Derek Mahon gravitates to romantic outsiders, in Gardiner the condition of cosmic unhousedness has come home to roost in even the most obdurate-seeming bourgeois surroundings."

Ah, but then the language of criticism & blurb is a language entirely of its own...

My favourite bit of puffery was said about the American Indian poet Joy Harjo's She Had Some Horses:

"This is not poetry. This is a voyage into womanspeak..."

Hmmm... Left-hand margins, verses, words, images....

Looks like poetry to me, pal...

...Oh, you're from California. That explains it...

But then I've got ironic bones, so that kind of thing never goes down well.

That could work as a blurb: 'Waling has ironic bones. His new collection is a voyage into manspeak.'