Does any of this
really matter? Who cares what some disappointed aristocrat wrote to soothe his
sense of career failure or some towering egotist wrote to massage his own enormous sense of
self-importance while living the high life in Italy?
Yes it does matter. We should care. To quote Pierre Bourdieu:
In an artistic field which has reached an
advanced stage of its history, there is no place for naïf’s: more
precisely, the history is immanent in the functioning of the field, and to meet
the object demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to
possess the whole history of the field.
There is far too much historical amnesia in the current discourse about poetry
Or to put it another
way, the whole house of cards that constitutes the field of modern poetry: the
way we talk about poetry, its obligatory
use in schools when the majority of any population, including the people
teaching it, don’t read it for pleasure, the way it is treated in University
writing programs, the claims made by governing bodies, the fact we have
governing bodies, attitudes
towards publication and reception, rests on these
works, and the way they have been recirculated in a sealed acoustic where the
phrase “where is your evidence?” has been treated as a sign of unbearable naivety by those guilty of a much more fundamental naivety.
So before going on to Pound
and Eliot
1) The modern world; some scattered observations
In what follows I want
to briefly look at some contemporary examples. This is not meant to be exhaustive, just an illustration, and space does not allow a detailed
analysis of each example. I’ve
already mentioned a couple of posts back about the 2013 “A Poet, Cheating for
money?” scandal, the bizarre things and in previous posts about the way we talk about Poetry in the
way we talk about no other art.
Examples can be easily
found in any contemporary discussion or use of poetry but Paul Dawson’s Creative
Writing and the New Humanities(2005),
and Terry Eagelton’s How to Read a
Poem (2007) will serve as one example. Both take for granted Sidney’s argument
about the power of Poetry.
According to Dawson
the purpose of modern creative writing courses should be to turn out “literary
Intellectuals” who will be “oppositional critics”. Oppositional criticism being:
textual or cultural critique of received opinions, with the
ultimate aim of affecting social change , or at least an alteration of public
opinion , beyond the refinements of disciplinary knowledge (p.201). This is an extension and variation on the romantic ideal of the outsider artist, given its most
famous poetic expression in Shelley’s Defence. The claims for Poetry
as an active participant in contemporary political processes, able to affect
the community at large, flounder
when one tries to see how this could operate outside the seminar room or find
an example.
Analysing the ideology
of poems written in the past, Terry Eagleton’s preferred method (Eagleton 2007), or discussing the ideology of poems written
in the work shop (Dawson) assumes poetry has inherent power over
the reader which apprentice poets need to learn to use in appropriate ways (for
which read, ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Dawson) and readers need
to learn how to resist (but only what and in ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Eagleton).
This is based on the equally traditional
belief that poetry “delights and instructs”, an idea that goes back in English to Sidney but beyond him
to Horace. Such an approach
reduces poetry to a carrier of
ideological viruses and poems to
content, just as the reviewers of
the late nineteenth century judged a poet for “what he [sic] said”.
However, at no stage can either Dawson or Eagleton, or
anyone else, show how studying poetry this way prepares the student to do
anything other than study poetry in this way. When put blandly: Poetry
is the art of using words charged to their
utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape,
appreciate and understand the power of language will become slaves to those who
retain it-be they politicians, preachers, copywriters or news casters (Gioia 1992) can seem
baffling in its casual arrogance.
Who are these
self-appointed “intellectual leaders”. Gioia’s title Can Poetry Matter is a
Koan like encapsulation of the
problem. It assumes “Poetry” means the same thing to everyone, and that it can
and should “matter” to everyone, in the same way for the same reasons.
Even when the writer
seems to be distancing herself from previous claims, she can be trapped into recycling them. In an
article published in the English Guardian in 2006 Adrienne Rich began by
quoting Shelley’s famous statement and then qualified what she was discussing.
I hope never to idealise poetry - it has
suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional
massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an
instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only
poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they
belong.
But by the end of the
article, which is only 995 words long,
she has forgotten this and is writing about “Poetry’ as if it were all
the things she has just claimed it is not:
Poetry has the capacity to remind us of
something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site
whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the
subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of
freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free"
market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view.
All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented (Rich 2006).
My final brief example
is from outside academic discussions. In the 21st Century, despite its miniscule share of the book
market, (last year Britons apparently spent more on Pringles Chips than poetry books) despite the invisibility of poets for the majority of the population, Poetry rather than poets or poems, still
has a privileged cultural position.
In 2009 the British based poetry publisher
Salt was in financial difficulties. Faced with impending bankruptcy it launched
an appeal called “Save Our Salt”. [1] Salt claimed that unless X number of books
were sold in a limited time, it would be finished. Word spread around the blogosphere, news outlets picked up
the story, Salt sold its required number of books and the crisis was
temporarily averted.
At the time it seemed
like a small but interesting example of the strange position poetry occupies in
modern culture. It was difficult to imagine General Motors Holden for
example, during one of its regular
financial crisis, appealing to the American consumer in a similar manner. “We are going broke because you don’t
want our product. Please buy the product you don’t want so we can continue to
make the make the product you don’t want.”
In 2010, faced inevitably
with the same problem, Salt relaunched their campaign with the following
statement from Griff Rhys-Jones on the website:
Support the good work here. Don’t let
Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor
manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants.
We can lose a few of them, but we do not have enough small independent and
daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than
Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t? It’s a great list. And
apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for
studious folk like us. [2]
For many British
communities the devastating social, economic and cultural effects of the
closure of major industrial operations like ‘Motor Manufacturers’ are too familiar. Why these might be lesser than the
disappearance of a small poetry
publisher raises questions, not just about the values of “studious folks like
us”, but about their attitudes to
poetry. Referring to an idealised Poetry, Jones cannot explain how poetry will help the
economy in many subtle ways. Nor can he help but reveal the clubby sense
that “bookish folk like us” feel they are rather superior to the masses who
rely on motor manufacturers and fast food restaurants.
So this tracking of the
defences is not “history” in the sense of something past and finished: whether or not Poets were prophets in
the early stages of an unspecified culture is of academic interest in the
derogatory sense of that term. Barbers were, until recently, surgeons, but nobody goes to one today for open
heart surgery. This is a history,
in Bourdieu’s terms which is immanent in
the functioning of the field. How
individual writers or teachers situate themselves depends to a large extent on
which versions of Poetry and Poet their craft is based on. To use another Bourdieu quote;
This is why…it is so important if one is to have a bit
of freedom from the constraints of the field, to attempt to explore the limits
of the theoretical box in which one is imprisoned.
And so onwards to Pound and Eliot.
CE: As with all these posts, you are welcome to use them as long as you acknowledge your source. Referencing has been removed as a small anti-plagiarism device. If you contact me through the comments I'll happily supply them.
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