The Poetry of Middle Age

The poetry of youth is a cliche, of course, as is the poetry of old age, death approaching - "no country for old men." Yet as we live longer, and as our own interests develop, there's surely a desire for a poetry of middle age, of experience, not innocence if you like. I was thinking this whilst reading C.K. Williams' impressive collected poems. Faced with such a large collection I decided to start, not at the beginning, but with his 1999 Pulitzer winner "Repair." These are long, discursive poems, of life lived, of memory, but of experience and knowledge, not of regret. Take "The Poet", where he remembers "Bobby the Poet, though whether he ever was one or not...might be a question," or "King" remembering MLK, and telling a story of American racism through memory of people walking to King's memorial service. What you see is memory used as a powerful device, not as nostalgia, but as a strong tool for explaining the present, through the sharp recall of experience. We need a poetry like this, of middle- or late- age, that gives a perspective that the poetry of the moment can't give and yet is not yet elegiac or resigned. Wonderful stuff. I met, and heard read, Williams last year in Norwich, and having his voice in my head as I read these extended lines, helped immensely - they are masterly, having a spaciousness that never overextends or becomes too languid.

What does it mean to be a poet in the internet age?

One of the things I like about America's venerable "Poetry" magazine are the surprises that it throws in now and then - translation issues, for instance - and in this issue, a mini-magazine within the magazine addressing two "new movements" for the 21st century, Flarf & conceptual writing. It's surely part of the role of a national poetry magazine to bring to a wider audience work from the margins.

Having had more than one conversation recently about the lack of web-based writing that actually comes out of the possibilities of the medium, perhaps its not a surprise that Flarf is primarily concerned with that medium. Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith, he introduces the subject by saying that "our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age?" What indeed...

He introduces us to writing that is interested in its own processes, "found poetry", but because of the dynamic nature of the internet, this is the wrong term, its perhaps a poetic equivalent of Eno's "generative music" - a writing that churns and changes with this immersive medium. Though its not all flarf, (using the term to mean spam or similar garbage) as Mel Nichols' charming modern day Whitman poem "I Google Myself" makes clear. Though reading its last lines, "I don't Google anybody else/And when I think about you I Google myself/Ooh, ooh, oo, oo, aah", its almost a mashup between e.e. cummings and long-forgotten Divinyls single "I touch myself." Sharon Mesmer and K. Silem Mohammad's poems are long lost offshoots of Ashbery's "Tennis Court Oath", juxtaposing random words from the internet into what otherwise looks and sounds like a normal poem, whilst in the conceptual pond Goldsmith's own "The Day" takes news articles from the newspaper on 9/11 and gives them a retrospective dread. "TOMORROW. Mainly sunny" reads one, "Islam is a dangerous religion", reads another, quoting a Houellebecq interview.

These things are of course closer to art practice than traditional poetry, but because the web is still a written medium, primarily, there's a nice playfulness with words that keeps them firmly in the poetry camp. Here, I think is the difference with much internet based generative art (thinking of Thomson & Craighead's installations that use live streams to create the content for their work) or indeed with older forms of "concrete" or "visual poetry."

Flarf is fun, and I think its the playfulness in this selection which is great. It's not saying "all other poetry sucks" or creating yet another divide where there's so many already. You can read all these pieces online here.

All of this deserves to be taken seriously, though perhaps not too seriously - there's surely no big agenda round conceptual writing other than as an interesting thing to do; and, surely with the "toolkit" that is the internet, we'd be surprised to find nothing that uses it. A sestina made out of Tweets for instance might be a nice little exercise, but who knows whether Twitter will remain in 5 years or more?
Katy Evans-Bush writes a little about it here, and the great thing about Flarf might be that we've all written it without realising it. And as Steven Waling says in response to the post, it's fine for a little while, but you don't necessarily want to just read this and nothing else.

I wrote quite a lot of generative or conceptual poems around the millennium. One of the most effective can be read here.

The Poetry that they Don't Teach You at School

Poetry readings are good value, for a few quid you get to see three or four poets, often interesting, sometimes excellent. The "sting" of course, is that there's usually a table of books somewhere near. Whereas a reading by a "name" will see a man from Blackwells or Waterstones hovering with a pile of Fabers or similar - pleasant enough, but nothing you can't buy from your local branch or the internet - a more obscure group of poets will come with a book table to die for.

Not a table, last week, but a bookshelf, at Bury Art Gallery, furnished a couple of gems (see above), the catalogue of the 2nd Bury Text Festival on the right, and on the left the anthology of the first year of "The Other Room." Both are handsome publications. Worth the price of admission on its own, for the Text Festival catalogue is the extract from Tony Lopez's "Only More So" some of which he read at last Saturday's reading. If some experimental poetry can seem an exercise in facility, this prose piece (that reads like poetry - a nice reversal of, say, the piece that Andrew Motion read on HardTalk last week) is Ashbery-ish in its juxtapositions but its surreality is an everyday one of observation, rather than something more dreamlike. Lines drop in from news articles of the day such as "Compensation paid to thalidomide victims is currently subject to UK income tax", or observations such as "We have a room full of people writing dialogue for digital agents." Here, Lopez is noticing how the contemporary sentence is the unit of rhythm, but these contemporary drop-ins seem like disruptions in the fabric of a more poetic, more ancient document, as if a reading by a medievalist or a hermit's ruminations are being interrupted by radio static. "Feeling content with form, I tried extension," he writes at one point, "Belief is the most challenging of human faculties." These apparent non-sequiturs make a contextual sense, as if we're weaving some blanket mixing emotion, memory and political anger. A brain working fully, in other words, across all the senses.

There is much else in the anthology to admire - but having heard Lopez's piece it was great to be able to re-read it. Visual art is alongside poetry and prose pieces. I was pleased to revisit one of Joe Devlin's Marginalias, as we published several in our very first issue of Lamport Court several years ago, as well as James Davies' humorously offbeat work. James features in both the text festival book, and as one of its founders (and half of poetry/art dualism Joy as Tiresome Vandalism) in "The Other Room Anthology 09/09." Having seen many of the poets read these or similar works live, there's a pleasure in revisiting those half-memories. Even those poets who perhaps didn't impress on the night, might offer something different on the page. One undoubted success, both on page, and when she read them live, was Alex Middleton's translations of Danish poet Inger Christensen, a series of litanies of the natural world, that sound both fragile and beautiful in English.

You can get the Other Room anthology from their website, and the lovely hardback catalogue from Bury Art Gallery.

A Tale of Two Carols

First things first, its without any reservations that I welcome Carol Ann Duffy's appointment as the new poet laureate. Its not just symbolic when a change like this happens, the first woman to ever hold the post, but a genuine sign that an institution has recognised the changes in the age. Under any measure, the last twenty years have seen an inexorable rise of the female poet. It wouldn't, I think, be such a "movement", had there not been such a lack in the decades and centuries before. Poetry is a small enough niche in our cultural sphere, that a poetry written only by one gender, seems impoverished, and Duffy, along with others - some of whom she mentioned in her Guardian piece yesterday - has done much to prove that's not the case. It's interesting that Simon Armitage, who was also mooted for the role, shared the triple grace of critical acclaim, commercial success and curriculum friendliness; and that both - reflecting three decades of active northern presses and poets - are both from and based in the north.

Andrew Motion did many good things in his laureate role - turning an unpaid sinecure into something of being "minister for poetry." Yet one cannot help but be glad that our official poetic centre has moved. Motion was usefully near to London, but, whilst at UEA, usefully far away. Though the train from Manchester is hardly ten minutes further away from the capital, there's a definite frisson in knowing that poet laureate lives a couple of miles from me, teaches a couple of miles from me. That is not to deny London its role - its where our poetry institutions are and still, despite the successes of Carcanet, Bloodaxe and others, where the publishing industry lives and works - but to authenticate a move away from a Londoncentrism that, for a young poet growing up anywhere else, would always be a barrier.

Yet Motion never attempted - was incapable of attempting - the one thing that British poetry has necessarily needed, artistically, over the last twenty years, namely, an accomodation between different influences and styles. As co-author, with Blake Morrison of the narrow, proscriptive, and dull, "Penguin Book of British Contemporary Poetry", how could he? Unfortunately for Carol Ann Duffy, her "to do" list not only includes being a cheerleader for poetry, and representing female, gay and Scottish poets, but also entering this debate.

I was at the Text Festival in Bury yesterday, where another Carol, Carol Watts, was one of three readers performing from their commissioned "Bury Poems." Along with Philip Davenport and Tony Lopez, we got a sense of one of the other poetic tribes - its self-defined avant garde. This is a poetry that is no less understandable or enjoyable than the mainstream, but has different aims, and different methods. What came out clearly, was that history, ideas, nostalgia, memory, of subject in these poems are relived through forms that are in turn expansive, word-focussed, and open-ended; poetry with a flow, rather than poetry that is pinned down. Carol Ann Duffy, one feels, will be a lot more open to a poetry world that is diverse and can make bridges between different styles and objectives than Motion ever would or could; yet she's also an insider, part of an expected orthodoxy. It will be interesting to see if the sense of what poetry is, and where it is coming from (particularly amongst new and younger poets), can expand under her watch. A laureate is hardly expected to be able to control the waters, but the Augean stables of contemporary British poetry remain in need of a little cleaning. A change of gender, as the writer of the "The World's Wife" knows only too well, can change the story as well.

(Post script, I'd called this a "tale of two Carols", but actually it's a tale of three, as yesterday on the way back from Bury bumped into my old friend, the Manchester poet Carol Batton - who, as ever, was kind and generous with her bags of poems. My friend Julia has uploaded a picture of one of the loveliest.)

New Blog for my Writing

I have finally got round to setting up a new blog for my poetry and fiction, and other writings. The link has been updated on the right of this post, or you can go directly there from here. At the moment it just includes links to any of my work that is still on the internet, but over time, I hope to add a range of stories and other work to download, as well as the occasional poem and non-fiction.

Poetry Prizes

My uncharacteristic silence the last week or two has its usual reasons...alcohol and Christmas. After managing around half a dozen parties since my last post, its amazing I've still got any of the braincells required for writing this occasional blog. Poetry prizes come in all shapes and sizes and I'm generally no fan of them, after all its hardly a competitive sport is it?

Yet I have to say I can only applaud the innovation of the online poetry slam that Poetry Republic have set up in support of the Mines Advisory Group charity. Judging is by the entrants - and the winner will be announced as part of the "not part of" Manchester International Festival fringe next summer.

And although, as an unsuccessful entrant, I should be a little down today after not making the shortlist for Salt Publishing's inaugural Crashaw Prize, I'm far more intrigued by the six shortlisted writers, who'll have their books published internationally, and knowing Salt, very handsomely, in the next few months. A quick Google search shows that these are all poets with a little bit of a track record; a sign perhaps that the "slush pile" is not made up the mad and hopeless, but the hardworking, the worthy, the progressive, the comming. From my own perspective, even the discipline to enter the competition - i.e. putting together a 70 page collection - was a valuable one.

The Manchester Poetry Prize

MMU's writing school has just announced a poetry prize, closing date in September, for which you submit a portfolio of poems - to be followed next year, and perhaps of more interest to me, by a fiction prize. Though laudable, and with a substantial prize, £10,000, I was intrigued reading the small print, that the "portfolio" is between 3 and 5 poems, up to a maximum of 120 lines. With an entrance fee of £15, I guess its all right for the sonneteer, not so for the balladeer; and the long poem I wrote this week breaks the limits all on its own. On poetry competitions generally, I've not much confidence, having never come close to being shortlisted. There's something of a lottery about them, a winner takes all mentality, that's perhaps a little too competitive, that seems almost antithetical to what makes a good poem. Worth a punt, but nothing more. In this instance, the international nature of the competition and the high profile institution awarding it, will no doubt lead to them being swamped with entries. When I've been choosing poems myself either to send somewhere or to include in a magazine, I'm a bit like Philip Larkin, who, when asked how he chose which poems of his own to include in an anthology, said he would pick 'n' mix, one funny, one sad, one long, one short; but I'd imagine here that the judges will be looking for the consistency of work, so send in your very best.