MY SHOUT! The snailmail version of this, which was set down long before all this web stuff came along, I was minded to call 'Poetry is dead, Baby?'
I think I plagiarised the title from somewhere; but the question mark at the end was definitely my own work. I would like to think that the poems that follow (which are wholly my own work) will do something to add to the great debate:
1. What is poetry and what is not poetry but something else?
2. Does that which, today, passes as poetry, do anything to promote poetry's cause or is it, in fact, exacerbating poetry's death?
3. If the pendulum has swung too far, what can be done to correct it - where to draw the line between the strict rhyme, strict meter of yesterday, on the one hand - and what, I suppose, was once called 'blank verse' (but, for which I could think up a number of less complimentary names), on the other?
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For poetry is DEAD!
But, then, if the truth be known, poetry probably is dead, was dead and always will be dead.
The death of poetry, certainly, never dies. It is a newsworthy perennial, resurrected by editors and feature writers every time a Poet Laureate dies, writes some terribly clever collection of verse about knocking off someone else's wife, or, as I originally scripted this, the Oxford Press announced that it had dropped all poetry from its book lists. Then, with morbid relish, editors pen its obituary.
Yet, somehow, still, with the tenacity that would make a neurosurgeon wonder, it lives on: The patient's condition shows grave cause for concern, yet poetry struggles on. The Dodo would have given its prehensile back teeth to discover the secret.
But, in the fight for life, its form has changed. Perhaps, like the bacteria that develops immunity against the drugs that seek to scourge it, poetry has taken on new forms. Are these forms going to prove the salvation of poetry - or are they, in truth, exacerbating poetry's death?
The endless verses of strict rhyme and meter with which I was tortured as a boy, were as regular and predictable in form as the generations that approved it. But they were also stiflingly restrictive - and stiflingly restricted, so, too, were we: Rules, class barriers, codes of conduct, etiquette, declension, pronunciation - 'Amo, Amas, Amat' and all that ....They were rigid, hidebound and inflexible - had existed, without challenge, for generations.....Then, suddenly, the new age dawned, all swept aside; and today their absence is just about as relevant as the absence of the Dodo from off the top deck of the Clapham Omnibus.
So just because there are so many poets today's who throw words onto a page like some poof with a powder puff, dabbling pretty their words, symmetrically onto a page, should we knock it for that?
Everywhere, the old order changes - and , perhaps, change, too, must we - or be left behind. 'Once...' wrote the American Poet, J. Dillon Freeman, '....I accepted change, and was not loath, to change, I found change was the very seed of growth.'
So where do I stand?
In truth, I dwell in a halfway house. My lap-top's hard drive is littered with half finished poems - the notion waiting for a stanza, the stanza waiting for a rhyme: And stay there they must, until inspiration comes: I cannot condone just dashing words down on paper, like emptying a can of baked beans out onto a plate - like an R.A throwing elephants dung at his canvas.
Yet conventional I refuse to be; and hidebound by the strict rules of verse and meter, I hope I will never be. We
write whatever we write, we paint whatever we paint, to say something - and, if that something is worth saying let it never be suppressed by any straight jacket called convention.But are there to be absolutely no rules? Is poetry, is art, really an unmade bed, strewn with rucked up sheets and wrinkled stockings? Is free verse just a label under which incompetence hides? So, has the pendulum swung too far? The difficult part of a poet’s skill is to vary and make use of his rhythm without losing it altogether. And, if it has swung too far, who is going to reach out and check it, put it back into equilibrium? Betjeman? He's dead - and more's the pity for that! And, of the two poets laureate following, Ted Hughes was far-too-clever-by-half and too obsessed with his own intellectual importance to have had any interest in doing anything to reverse the trend and Andrew Motion has to learn to write poetry before he can have any meaningful influence. I say that, if ever there will be a real bard rising from the ashes and holding the chalice high, then that bard will come from out of Wales - honor where honor is due - the Welsh sure have the gift, when it comes to poetry.
So, if there are rules,who should say what they should be? Perhaps, in these enlightened times, we should all be free to make our own - as long as there are some. And apart from being absolutely convinced that to qualify as poetry, blank verse needs just a vestige more discipline in seeking form and shape than merely center-tabbing verses into Microsoft Word - and making them print out in pretty, symmetrical shapes on the page, here are some disciplines that I would dare to suggest that today's poet would do well to strive for, if he or she is to help the cause of poetry's survival:
1. 'Be funny, John, and try to be original!' So, Betjeman recounts, his father counseled him. The time line of poetry has been plagued with poets in love, with poets with a metaphorical spot on a metaphorical private part, with poets taking themselves really rather seriously. Life is just a process where one is squeezed out of a **** at one end and into a coffin at the other. We make what we can of the middle bit and, in doing so, learn an awful lot of lessons. If it is the lot of poets to write down lessons, then the best teachers make their lessons fun: So, if we have anything to hand down in life, then, in doing so, lets try and inject some fun into it.
2. Be honest......If this gift towards which we aspire - the ability to compress the larger images of life into the J-Peg image of the computer - is going to be abused by too clever-by-half poets and Poet Laureates, penning frightfully clever words and word sequences, with all the veiled meaning that a bottle or two of Rijoca may induce in the wee hours of the morning (but which have as much meaning and substance as Danny Kaye's King's Magic Suit) then poetry will die, a sham. To these too clever by half poets I would offer this counsel: Read it again in the morning when you are cleaning your teeth; and if, then, you have the vaguest notion of just what you thought was so hugely clever last night, then it might just be worth a second draft!
3. Be mature. Write reflectively about what you know, not what you think you know. Poets have a propensity to write about pain when, if truth be known, they have never experienced anything more uncomfortable in their lives than the rim of a cold piss-pot, in a childhood out of which they have never emerged. Please don't think I am trying to discourage creativity by young poets - bless them for their immaturity. But older poets cannot afford to be immature.
4. Be brief. The novelist can, should, must embroider. The short novels, Hemingway's 'Old Man and the Sea', Robert James Waller's 'Bridges of Madison County', or the works of Steinbeck, each with their carefully chosen words, their carefully constructed sentences, could be poetry in their own right, were they not, thank God, handed down to us as novels. Such classics are the only exception to the rule that the novelist writes from out of his head - but the poet should be writing from somewhere down in his small intestines. And, the epic poems apart, the poet's brief is to be brief - to reduce, may I re-iterate, the digital images of life into compressed form: Poetry is not a contest to see who can keep the metronome ticking the longest.
I hope that, in the poems of mine that follow,there will be found just a vestige of rhyme, just a vestige of meter; I hope that they are not without some humour; and, most of all, I hope that, as I look back over my three score years and ten, that I have been honest about the successes and the failures, the highs and the lows: For that, essentially, is the poet's brief.
