The Best American Poetry

British Poets, Day Six: Atlantic/Pacific [by Todd Swift]

Today, Hilary Clinton made headlines in Britain, by “expressing concern” about plans to cut spending here on military procurement.  I mention this to underline how interconnected the US/UK relationship – “special” or not – still is, not just culturally, but military-industrially.  Meanwhile, David Cameron and General Petraeus have been meeting over the botched rescue of a British citizen kidnapped by the Taliban, and maybe killed accidentally by an American rescuer, who may have thrown a hand grenade that killed her as she lay on the ground.  Though there is a documented “Atlantic drift” in the poetry community, as much binds as releases the two former great powers, both watching the rise of China.

Poets in the 20^th century in the Anglo-Saxon world tended to speak of a mid-Atlantic current, that saw the loan-lease of poetic talents, such as Auden and Eliot.  Hugh Kenner, a Canadian, wrote about this, in A Sinking Island, and then there is Fishing By Obstinate Isles, let alone A Shrinking Island, Jed Edy’s title echoing Kenner’s.

I don’t think we can any longer speak of mid-Atlantic poets (Robert Lowell was one, at ease in London as Boston).  I was tempted to call them Pan-Poets, or the New Jet Set (a little ungreen).  I have therefore decided to call them Atlantic/Pacific poets – poets whose national identities are enwebbed in travel, education, and publication, in several  nations at once, and therefore, in their cosmopolitan internationalism creatively scramble the tired old nationalist labels.  In the process, they release the English-language poetic tradition since Modernism into its widest swing, the compass arm describing a very wide arc of styles and experiences, indeed.  Other poets I have featured so far this week could have been included here, but this list includes a poet born in New Zealand, one born in Australia, one born in America who intelligently and creatively engage with the British and American poetic traditions, as well as ones closer (perhaps) to home – whatever that might mean.

Kathryn Maris, a New Yorker now based in London, was educated at Columbia University (BA) and Boston University (MA, Creative Writing). She is the author of The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006) and a second collection forthcoming with Seren in the United Kingdom. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, and fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center and Yaddo.  Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Harvard Review, and Poetry Review.  She has written essays and book reviews for Time Out, American Poet, Poetry London and New Welsh Review.  She teaches creative writing at Morley College and Kingston University.  Her poems are anthologised in Oxford Poets 2010.

Doubting Thomas

Call me Infidel, or just call me Tom.
Call me handsome, call me cold, call me bitter, call me cad
call me No-Better-Than-Judas-Iscariot
call me bachelor, call me saint, call me numb.

I was abused, I was married, I took pills, I was left,
I was in love, I was a liar, I was a drunk, I was in debt,
I wrote a book, I had some fame, then I was dead,
'til I was saved, I slept around, I was too young, I was bereft.

You are good, you are beautiful, you are kind, you forgive,
you are loving, you are smart, you're adored and you are brave.

There's no one else. It isn't you. I'm circumspect. I'm full of doubt.
It wouldn't work. We're not alike. I don't know what I want.

Call me weak, call me ingrate, call me 'once bitten, twice shy.'
Call me anything, but please don't say I make you want to die.

Don Paterson at the Y (by David Yezzi)

Here's a little intro I wrote for Don Paterson, who read at the 92nd Street Y last night with Paul Muldoon. It's not much of anything, and certainly not even a shadow of Paterson's gorgeous reading, but it has a few biographical facts that might interest folks who don't know Paterson's work. Unfortunately, I had to leave out quotes from poems I thought he might read. Here's one from his latest book, Rain, called "Correctives" that breaks my heart (the second-born of his identical twin boys, now 10, has a hand tremor, as the result of a difficult birth):

The shudder in my son’s left hand

he cures with one touch from his right,

two fingertips laid feather-light

to still his pen. He understands

 

the whole man must be his own brother,

for no man is himself alone;

though some of us have never known

the other hand’s kindness to the other.

Don Paterson, 92^nd Street Y, October 14, 2010

When Bernard Schwartz from the Poetry Center contacted me about this evening with Don Paterson and Paul Muldoon, it wasn’t immediately clear to me if he was putting together a poetry reading or a rock concert. I mean, on the one hand, we have Paul Muldoon—rhythm guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder (with the Milton scholar Nigel Smith) of the “Stones-via-Cream-via-Hendrix” influenced rock band Rackett, performing at the Knitting Factory and other venues—and on the other hand Don Patterson, jazz guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder with Tim Garland of the Euro-jazz-Celtic-folk ensemble Lammas, whose numerous albums include tracks such as The Water in the Rock, a setting of a poem by Antonio Machado for voice and 12-string guitar. What kind of evening are we talking about?, I asked Bernard. Strictly poetry, he assured me.

And yet I can’t help feeling that, despite the absence of Marshall stacks and gleaming Zildjian symbols, what we have in prospect tonight is, in a very important sense, an evening of music. Given the innumerable nuanced sounds that good poetry makes—its rhythms, its chimes and hiccups, its hectorings, its sentence sounds and melodies, its organ tones and wave-laps of syntax: in other words, its music—it is not surprising that the poet and the musician should often be the same person.

Originally from Dundee, Scotland, Don Paterson left school at 16 and moved to London to join a band. Poetry, for him, came later, even as music remained a constant companion and a companion project. Music may be found throughout Paterson’s poems—sometimes as the subject itself. Take his poem “The Box,” from his collection Landing Light, a poem written in the shape of a guitar—the box of the title refers to the hollow body of an acoustic guitar, as in guit-box. Like his poems, this instrument is so well-made, so attuned to and expressive of the sounds of feeling that, as he says, “it takes no more than a dropped shoe or a cleared throat on the hall landing to set its little blue moan off again.”

Or there is the tribute in his most recent collection, Rain, to the minimalist electronic group TBA, from the Republic of Georgia, and its leader Natalie “Tusja” Beridze. The charged music of the poem halloos Paterson’s admiration for a fellow musician, with a glimpse, too—in its incantatory techno-speak—of Paterson’s parallel life at the moog and the mixing board:

                        Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing

                        the range with those bat-scaring frequencies ring-modulated

            sine-bursts and the more distressing pshycoacoustic properties

            of phase inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing

                        you are nonetheless beautiful as the mighty Boards

            themselves in your shameless organicising of the code.

Organicising the code—that is what the best poets (and musicians) do, isn’t it? They take the raw matter, the data and the program of language, and make it their own. Paterson uses rhyme—in the poem I’ve just quoted from and elsewhere—and meter with a freshness and mastery that gives us the cadence of our contemporary speech as if for the first time.

Rain—how presciently titled, given the down-pour outside—is dedicated to the memory of the poet Michael Donaghy, a fellow musician on the page and off. Michael read at the Unterberg Poetry Center not long before he died, of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 50, six years ago now. Though Michael lived his adult years in London, he was a boy in New York. While he was working as a doorman, a Y patron in his building, Joan Jacobsen, saw him reading a book of poetry and gave him a Poetry Center membership, which he remembered fondly on that night. In Paterson’s sequence “Phantom,” Michael speaks to his friend: “Don’t let pass,” the phantom says,

talk of my saintliness, or those attempts

to praise my average musicianship

beyond its own ambitions: music for dancers.

All I wanted was to keep the drum

so tight it was lost under their feet,

the downbeat I’d invisibly increased,

my silent augmentation of the One—

the cup I’d filled brimful . . . then even above the rim!

But these outward connections to music and musicians are also pointers to the deeper, more mysterious and affecting music in Paterson’s poems—through which the poems express our deepest connections to one another. There is the heartbreaking lyric of a son’s trembling hand, of a swing-set that feels the absence of the child, of the lie that will not be silenced, and of the crushing lack left by a friend who has died. Tonight, let’s have some of the old songs—while they’re still new!—performed by one of our very finest singers, Don Paterson.

British Poets, Day Five: The Fabulists [by Todd Swift]

Yesterday and today the world experienced the Chilean miracle at Camp Hope, where thirty-three miners were rescued after months of doubt and darkness - a time they survived with optimism, creativity, and inspiring communitarian spirit.  The event, to my mind equivalent to the moon landings in terms of human and technical drama (not a unique thought, I am sure), is particularly resonant of the literary style of "magic realism" which came from Chile's part of the world, a style that saw the miraculous in the everyday.  It therefore seems apt to celebrate, today, poets whose work touches upon, in a variety of ways, fable, dreams, enchantment, faith, and the extraordinary - poets I will label (if just for this post), "The Fabulists".

When discussing this with one of the poets included below, Matthew Gregory, he had this to say: "it seems to me a kind of new Romanticism of some sort, allowing for the frivolous and the camp, something like the Victorian horror crazes, but, when it works, with something of a truthful enquiry, is like the best of magic realism. It seems to be happening generally, doesn't it? In the mid 1990s, I'm quite sure there wasn't as much vampire love on television as there is now. And in poetry, on the whole. Underwood, Kennard and sometimes Emily Berry write with many voices, untrustworthy narrators, ghosts and anthropomorphic subjects.  I think reading Charles Simic, James Tate, the Eastern Europeans/Polish (Holub, Szymborska) and some Ashbery is where we'll find the nerve of this particular ache."

Now, a few grumpy critics in Britain have complained that these labels I am applying may be constraints for these poets as they develop - which seems to miss the point of these posts entirely - as with all literary labels, these are provisional, arbitrary, and, indeed, like literary criticism itself, equivocal, in a creative sense.  I offer these as ways to read and appreciate these poets, but not as "Swiftian" "puffery".  There is nothing satirical about it, and very little puff.  Though I do like Puff the Magic Dragon.

Kathryn Simmonds was born in Hertfordshire in 1972 and worked in children's publishing and the charity sector before pursing writing seriously, although she has written poetry since childhood.  She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and her pamphlet Snug was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2004 as a result of their annual competition.  Her first full collection Sunday at the Skin Launderette won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2008 and was short listed for the Costa Poetry Award.  She is also interested in prose and dramatic writing - her short stories have appeared in The Barcelona Review, The Liberal Magazine and a number of anthologies, and she has written a play for Radio 4.  Now living in north London, she works as a writing tutor for the City Lit, Morley College and The Poetry School.  Simmonds is one of the only poets in Britain who, though subtly and never condescendingly, replies to a British secularism that disenchants the world, with her own quietly held sense of Catholic faith; as such, her poems form part of the great debate between science and religion occuring now - though they are, of course, also about much else besides.

Nocturne

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks,
midnight for you dear and your chest hair too,

put your pen down pet and rest here.
Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing

my mother in her pale blue slippers,
and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed.

Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering
us at last from sense-making. The trains

are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block
has lost another dozen yellow squares but

they'll fill up and we'll fill too, and in tomorrow's
morning we'll awake, washed up again among

the bills.  Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up
to get behind your lids.  Love, give me your hand.

British Poets, Day Four: The Entertainers [by Todd Swift]

Last night, Howard Jacobson won the coveted Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction of the year published by a Commonwealth author (hence the exclusion of Americans), roughly the UK's equivalent, in prestige, to the Pulitzer.  Jacobson was not the bookies favourite, but he has been on the radio and in the papers all week over here, arguing for the importance of comedy in fiction (he is a very funny writer).

This morning, on BBC 4, he explained how he felt that all novels should be funny, always.  I am not convinced by this claim, yet at the same time recognise the many comedic contributions to the form by British writers of the last century, such as Waugh, Wodehouse and Amis (pere).  Light verse in England, as I intimated on Sunday, is itself a noble genre - what would British poetry be without its Copes, its Smiths?  Auden and Larkin were often at their best when funny.  Poetry couldn't cope without its humourists.  I thought about following the "New Seriousness", in all seriousness, with "The New Comedy", but that seemed a bit wide of the mark.

Establishment poetry in the UK sometimes seems a bit shy of laugh-aloud humour in poetry. When comedy appears in British poetry it can tend to be either pub-stand-up funny (and a bit crass) or rather po-faced (very few Cambridge school poets are funny often).  Not very precise, really, but maybe it helps to imagine what the middle-ground of poetry humour might be - not so much wit, or comedy, as the willingness to perform, in some way, one's work - a generosity towards an audience.

The idea that poetry can entertain, can delight, as well as inform, is vital for many poets in the UK, and so today I wish to welcome three poets, who, in a variety of ways - either through music hall tradition, or sheer musicality, staging plays, or simply slamming them, have explored the ways poetry can reach wider audiences, without sacrificing quality or vision. Each is respected, published, and admired for the way their language works on the page.  Yet each has one ear on the stage, as well.  They might be surprised to find themselves linked in this way, but for me, these are some of the rising best of the UK's poetic Entertainers.

A.F. Harrold is based in Reading, England. He was born in Sussex in 1975. His publications include two full poetry collections, Logic And The Heart (Two Rivers Press, 2004) and Flood (Two Rivers Press, 2010), and one limited edition collection in collaboration with artist Jo Thomas, Of Birds & Bees (Quirkstandard's Alternative, 2008). Also, two collections of comic prose and poetry, Postcards From The Hedgehog (Two Rivers Press, 2007) and The Man Who Spent Years In The Bath (Quirkstandard's Alternative, 2008), and a book of poetry for children I Eat Squirrels (Quirkstandard's Alternative, 2009). He has performed poetry, comedy and cabaret around the world, at many festivals.  In 2008 he was the Glastonbury Festival's Official Website's Official Poet-in-Residence.  This year he is working on a poetry commission for Cheltenham Festival of Literature using suggestions gathered on Twitter to write a brand new suite of poems which will be unveiled on stage towards the end of the Festival.


Houseplants

I am almost always a helpless killer of houseplants.
When my obituary gets written it won't read -
the poet, who died peacefully in the bath last night,
is survived by three aspidistra and a succulent.
No - they will have gone on long before me.

I'm led to believe it may be an inherited trait -
my nan never received flowers for long.
She gave away growing gifts as soon as
the generous givers were out of the room.
My mother took them in - they grew for her.

I suffer an addictive personality - in short bursts.
Sudden enthusiasms erupt and wither with time -
what filled my days, mind and hands soon goes -
the love affair runs out of steam, the steamer sits
filling a corner of the kitchen dry and silent.

Poor plants though - taken in always in good faith
and overwatered liberally for a few quick weeks -
they wilt with my indulgence, my diligence, my care,
but how else, I ask, can I show them my love?
Like flannels they droop, look sick, and I feel guilt,

promise to give them space, and soon do just that.
Passing through the living room one day, I notice
a stick drop its last yellow leaf into a pot of dry earth -
and I apologise, feel the guilt twist, but run outside
to where my new friend sits waiting in her new car.

British Poets, Day Three: The New Seriousness [by Todd Swift]

This week, the BBC's theme has been "fairness" - as multiple cuts to the State continue to raise serious concerns.  Today, the Browne report (from Lord Browne, a former head of BP, of all unwelcome things) suggested removing the fee cap for university tuition which is now held to less than £4,000 a year, even for an Oxbridge education.  It is thought that fees could go as high, under this scheme, as £12,000 per year, for better universities; obviously, the fear is that some universities wouldn't be able to compete and would close, as far fewer students attended.  Already, England has some of the lowest rates of access to higher education in the Western world.  Fairness indeed.

Is poetry fair?  Is British poetry?  What would "fair poetry" even mean?  As Christopher Ricks has shown in his recent book on literary friendships and influences, poetry gets along through a never-ending  series of
near-invisible, highly nuanced, events that inflect the lives of poets - by which I mean, support, alliances, favouritism, friendship, critical approval (or destruction) and so on.  Poets swim in terribly difficult waters, and, in the UK, are far less likely to be philanthropically underwritten.  There has yet to be a Ruth Lilly moment in British poetry.  Even Faber & Faber gets Arts Council funding for some of its publications, such as its recent Young Poets series.  One wonders if any of that will last the big axe coming.  How will this impact the next wave of younger poets?

Certainly, as I have sought to show recently, there is a kind of splendid resurgence of quality poetry among the young, those under 40, in these isles.  I find the talent and variety nearly-overwhelming.  It is hard to
imagine, on the basis of their debuts, which of these brilliant twenty and thirty-somethings, will one day be the new laureate, so spoiled for choice are we here.

One group of young poets has emerged that I would like to designate "The New Seriousness" school.  In it would be poets like Sarah Howe, Jon Stone, James Brookes, and Toby Martinez.  Not that these poets aren't seriously funny - they are, at times, but that their work is inventively stretching beyond the less-challenging mainstream models of the last few decades, without giving up on the lyric tradition.  Taking more cues from, say, Geoffrey Hill, or American poets, than Heaney or Paul Farley, they write with an awareness of the Muldoon-Paterson linguistic-brio patterns of musicality, but are darker, more imaginatively engaged with history, and intertextuality.  They read like the future.

James Brookes was born in 1986 and has lived in Sussex for most of the last twenty years, less than a mile from the birthplace of Shelley. He studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick, where he became Contributing Editor of The Warwick Review. He won an Eric Gregory in 2009. The TLS review of his pamphlet The English Sweats (Pighog Press, 2009) included the following: "in every sense a generous book from a generously gifted young poet".  He is currently studying to be a solicitor.  His influences would include Robert Lowell, Ivor Gurney, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Fiona Sampson, Christopher Middleton, Peter Davidson, among others.  One senses that his library contains Dupuy and Dupuy's Encyclopedia of Military History, Sir Charles Oman'sThe Art of War in the Middle Ages and Baron Jomini's Precis of the Art of War.

Near All Hallows

A lone hen pheasant breaks the surface tension
of the meadow grass. The Bleeding Canker
stoops Horse Chestnuts, as if for the headsman.
The lanes fragmenting beneath Mills Bomb conkers.
The wind a language shorn of obstruents.
All matter being but a shadow thrown
by and upon itself.  Real stuff all the same.
See ħ, that is Planck's Reduced Constant.
Yes, Feynman, human gods are too provincial.
And reason's jack-o'-lantern is agape
at such light guttering from its worked-out smile.
Thanks be to all things rotten before they're ripe:
the bletted quince turned edible at last;
the medlars sweetened, open-arsed by hoarfrost.

British Poets, Day Two: Three Unexpected (?) Figures [by Todd Swift]

On my second day here, I want to extend the range of poets I wish to share with you, by offering three poems by three poets, who, each, in different ways, broaden the mainstream of British poetry, and, challenge its norms, without becoming iconoclasts.

The first, Giles Goodland, makes nonsense of the old us-and-them tussle between experimental and mainstream that so occupied the poetry battles of the last decades, with his poems that are variously lyric, or avant-garde, and sometimes both; often inflected with surrealist play, and an interest in formal constraints.  Primarily, as a lexicographer, he is fascinated by words, and lists.  He is becoming a very significant mid-career poet in Britain.

The second, Carrie Etter, is also admirable, for her hybrid ability to move between the differing parts of the poetry playing field - as academic, anthologist, and poet; Etter's own work is popular (and, performed beautifully) but also willing to explore language and form.  Her recent anthology of experimental women poets is a highly-useful and timely intervention; further, Etter, as an American expatriated to London, occupies that vital continuum that began with Pound and Eliot (and Frost) of Americans in England who actively shape the poetic discourse of the country, and very much belong to two nations.

Finally, the most cosmopolitan of the three is the Oulipo-inspired Paris-based poet-editor Rufo Quintavalle, half-Italian, half-English, whose Francophile interests have intersected with a long project to ingeniously incorporate text from Whitman into his own poems.  Again, commonplace ideas of identity and labels are complicated here - it is almost silly to attempt to place his poetry, though another link with Britain is surely the Oystercatcher pamphlet, recently become a hallmark of innovation and surprise.

Other British Poets: October Notes From A Small Island [by Todd Swift]

I am glad to be back blogging at Best American Poetry, today, this auspicious ten-ten-ten.  London has been experiencing – at last – an Indian summer this weekend – today was 20 Celsius and sunny, which has briefly elevated spirits – otherwise, the UK is in the midst of a slow-moving train wreck, as the Coalition government plans to announce its major (40%) cuts to the State later this month, which has most leading Arts organisers predicting disaster.  Some pundits claim this is a sharper knife than ever Thatcher wielded, so it is a fraught moment, to be sure.  But, as if dancing on the Titanic or Nero-fiddling in Rome, the poets are playing on, business as usual.  This Thursday was “National Poetry Day”, and there were hundred, likely thousands, of readings across Britain, in schools, libraries, festival halls and so on.  Announcements play a big part at this time.

 The Forward Prize for Best Collection went to Seamus Heaney, for Human Chain. Notably, Walcott’s brilliant White Egrets was nowhere to be seen on the shortlist. Which is a pity, because, in terms of late style, it is arguably the better book by an older Nobel laureate.  Human Chain has touched the British poetry world for two reasons: a) they cannot resist Heaney’s charms (he is truly afforded Wotan-like status here); and b) the sentimental human interest behind the work (illness, ambulance rides) has, in anti-Eliot fashion personalised the poetry and made it come alive for the mainstream.

Heaney’s towering status over in Britain (and of course Ireland) is all the more notable for the fact it finds no balance from an equivalent “foreign” presiding spirit, from, say, the Americas.  There is no current British consensus as to who the great American poets are, as when Lowell, Berryman and Plath, in the Sixties, achieved eminence in these isles with the support of Alvarez; or, for that matter, Olson, or Ginsberg, did, from different sources.  If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that the main American poets admired or read by the British are Billy Collins, WS Merwin, CK Williams and Louise Gluck.  Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Stephen Burt, CD Wright, and Charles Bernstein would be lesser-known but admired experimental figures.  I am speaking of reception from a mainstream perspective, here.  Obviously, some poets and poetry readers would be more savvy, but there is no Heaney-sized figure to counterbalance his claim on greatness.  Even Yeats had Eliot and Pound to pull against.  Heaney, in this British orbit, only has the influence of Muldoon.  Muldoon’s new book is out here recently too, but has yet to really make an impact.  I expect it to be short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize in due course.

The other big news on National Poetry Day was from BBC broadcasting stalwart Melvyn Bragg, who had conveniently discovered a “new poem” by Ted Hughes from his archives at the British Library, which was promptly published.  This has led to dubious Facebooking grumblings from the poetariat, one younger poet, Jack Underwood noting that it was more a draft than a poem, and the big X across it was more a warning than a welcome.  Hughes is very loved in Britain, and when the last lines of this maudlin poem about the death of Plath were read out on BBC radio, the nation sobbed, one felt.  However, Al Alvarez, writing in yesterday’s Saturday Guardian Review (a less-influential but equivalent English version of the New York Times book section) pointed out the relative unimportance of the poem, and how Hughes had been bedding another woman the weekend of her suicide (she died Monday) in the Hughes-Plath honeymoon suite – rather tacky.

I hope to follow-up from the posts I wrote when last I blogged here, and continue to share the names and works of some of the most innovative and intriguing poets writing from Britain at the moment.  Over the summer, some controversy erupted over some of the aspects of Bloodaxe’s seminal new anthology, Identity Parade, which seeks to represent, broad-church style, the latest trends in all schools of newer British poetry.  I found it less inclusive than it might have been, but still recommend the book, nonetheless, as a good way in to the rather bewildering world of British poetry as it is now unfolding.

A Different Center [by Dante Micheaux]

 The envy of all other arts organizations (because of its titanic wealth), the Poetry Foundation “aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art, and to make it directly relevant to the American public.” If this is a truly an aspiration, perhaps it might make more sense to move past racializing the information it provides the public. I know that the trendy intellectual stance is to have no opinion or have all opinions—which in my thinking amount to cowardice. I am nitpicking here but it is an easy matter to clear up.

Jay Wright is, unequivocally, the greatest living American poet. I can say this because his poetry represents everything that America is and, unlike any of his contemporaries that might come close to possessing his gifts, not what he would like it to be. So, it goes without saying that I am vexed at the Poetry Foundation’s description of him, in what is otherwise an astute biography, as “one of America’s leading African-American voices.” Not surprisingly, John Ashbery is described as “one of the greatest twentieth-century American poets.” Because Mr. Ashbery is simply described as American, is it given that he is white? In fact, nothing is mentioned about Ashbery’s identity (white, wealthy, homosexual or otherwise) and the biography discusses his poetry on it merits.  I believe Mr. Wright deserves the same approach. His work demands it! Wright’s poetry flattens his “great” peers with a range that is simultaneously philosophical and concrete. He has achieved his goal of uncovering the weave of American culture.

Wright is a difficult poet but, paraphrasing Harold Bloom, there are difficult pleasures to be had from his high song. Moreover, he would be less difficult if the teaching of history were more accurate and reflected Wright’s range. Derek Walcott once said that he refuses the saga of Europe as center and this is Wright’s position. “But it is not enough to / to sip the knowledge / of our failings.¹” There is a way into Wright’s language and his poetry, if given the proper attention, is redemptive. He asks “if the world is real enough / to measure [his] intention²” and teaches his readers that “[i]t is time to rewrite the history of darkness / and the way our ballbearing stars slip around / and away from each other.³” Our country needs this poetry more than any other.

I am not sure how the Poetry Foundation decides who gets to be a great American poet. It is unfortunate that the formula African-American < American is still true in the USA. My apologies to anyone who is tired of Ellisonian argument but it does matter. Ignorance of semantics perpetuates racism. Wright says, “I shall walk carefully / about this contradiction— / the changed dimension / that marks my native speech, / the salutary inscription that settles / my bones.⁴” There are enough resources at the Poetry Foundation to walk carefully and get it right.

1. from “The Dead” – Wright, Jay. Transfigurations. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

2. from “Inscrutability” – Wright, Jay. Transfigurations. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

3. from “The Anatomy of Resonance” – Wright, Jay. Transfigurations. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

2000.

4. Wright, Jay. The Presentable Act of Reading Absence. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2008. 

Another Side of William Matthews

It turns out that the late Bill Matthews (1942-1997), author of A Happy Childhood and other works of poetic excellence, had a side to him that not even his admirers suspected.

<< 

President William Matthews sat where American presidents have always sat -- his back to the south wall of the room, facing northward across a wide antique desk toward the classical marble fireplace that dominates the north wall. His chair, unlike that of most of his predecessors, who had favored personalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the kind any senior corporate executive might have. For “Bill” Matthews, as he insisted his publicity posters call him, had always through his successive and successful election campaigns stressed his ordinary, down-home personal tastes in clothing, food, and creature comforts. The chair, therefore, which could be seen by the scores of delegates he liked to welcome personally into the Oval Office, was not luxurious. The fine antique desk, he was at pains to point out, he had inherited, and it had become part of the precious tradition of the White House. That went down well. But there Bill Matthews drew the line.

When he was in conclave with his senior advisers, the “Bill” that his humblest constituent could call him to his face became the formal “Mr. President.” He also dropped the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled bird-doggrin that had originally gulled the voters

Into putting the boy-next-door into the White House. He was not the boy-next-door, and his advisers knew it; he was the man at the top.

>> 

 See Frederick Forsyth, The Devil’s Alternative, for more details.

-- DL

Young British Poets: Brigley, Potts and Ttoouli by Todd Swift

I had a wonderful May Day party at my flat in Maida Vale today, to celebrate, among other things, a housewarming, and a recovery from ill health; many friends gathered, and, as the weather turned, and rain bucketed down, we came inside, until midnight (GMT) for tea and wine.  Many poets attended, including Alan Brownjohn, Tim Dooley, Denise Riley, Barbara Marsh, Kathryn Maris, Nancy Mattson, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, Emily Berry, Katrina Naomi, Leah Fritz, Giles Goodland, Mr Social Control, Liane Strauss, Ashok Bery and Kavita Joshi.  However, as I began to contemplate this, my last guest blog, I became a little wary.  Surely, there is something ill-timed about shipping poems from Britain to America at a time when British Petroleum is destroying a way of life for many Americans.  As I am no supporter of the oil industry, and neither are the final three poets I wish to share with you tonight, I can only say that we are very sorry to see such a human disaster visited upon you, and wish you a very speedy recovery from this terrible spill.

Over the last week, I've wanted to share varieties of new (and emerging) British poetry with readers of this important blog.  At the beginning of the week, I suggested a tentative list of 25 poets worth following as their work develops.  I might have let that list drift to 40, and added poets like Jay Bernard, Ben Wilkinson, Camelia Stafford, Jon Stone, Ahren Warner, Katrina Naomi, Sam Jackson, Declan Ryan, Christopher Horton, and several others.  The point being - there isn't yet a definitive shorter list of who "the next next generation" will be in the UK - partly because the current period is remarkably fecund, volatile, and under-studied.  One of the paradoxes of Digital Age poetry is that, as we know, there are more poets than readers, but, even more to the point, more good poets than "bad ones".  This democracy and wide spread of ability and quality leads to "a good thing" - lots of good poems - but also can tempt critics, and readers alike, into avoiding the harder work of winnowing.  Not to exclude, but to allow extra attention to be applied to certain poets and texts, if only so that some poems get studied, read again, and memorised.

On reading the recent anthology Identity Parade, I remarked that while it contained work by several major poets (Alice Oswald, for one), and several very important newer poets (Jacob Polley, Daljit Nagra, and Patience Agbabi, for instance), it had few poems that marked this period as instantly "great" - that is it had many very good poems, but only a handful that were (or seemed to be immediately) extraordinary, in canonical terms.  In Britain, the emphasis on the brief lyric poem concentrates the idea of such a focus, because New Criticism celebrated these lyric poems most of all, as well.  It may be impossible to compare one age with another, one period and another, but have the 00s produced a dozen British poems as impressive as those of the 70s - one thinks of poems by Ian Hamilton, Ted Hughes, Larkin, and Heaney?  They have, it must be assumed.  What is required, and it may take time, is for a critical argument to be made, to support such a position, and to offer the evidence, the poems that truly move and inspire.