you can read Watts' article here.
I think she has a case, though I wish obviously intelligent people would stop making silly claims for poetry: apparently reading good poetry will save us from people like Trump and Farage. Really? How? If writers can't refrain from such obvious silliness they should at least be obliged to offer some evidence that poetry can do this. A dangling quote from the self-serving wishful thinking of Eliot, or Shelley, or Sydney, or Ezra Pound or Dana Gioia does not count as evidence.
For what it's worth I also think she states her case in a way that almost invites the kind of response she's received. The willingness of critics to make an unpopular case is one of the pleasures of reading Pn Review. But the tone here sounds like she's trying to keep the undesirables of her patch of finely manicured lawn.
I haven't read Plum and after Watts' article I admit I won't. I've been more interested in mainstream journalistic responses to Milk and Honey (which i have read) and its author. It's been fascinating to watch journalists attempt to explain a publishing phenomena. The attempts have been almost universally woeful.
So here's a related thought:
Ignorance
is the new Elitism.
This is
about poetry in English.
There was a
time when Ignorance was unavoidable.
Education
was a lottery and access depended on your parents’ race, class, income, social
standing, and geographic position. For most of history, for the majority, there
was no chance of bun fights in the dorms, fagging, Latin classes, school songs
and cold baths, and certainly no possibility of spending three years at a
university behaving badly while complaining about how bored you were.
For those
who belonged to that majority and wanted to participate in poetry, resentment
was a logical outcome. It was almost impossible not to feel that there was an
elitist edge, and culture was being exploited to keep the plebs out. So the
temptation to assault the culture was understandable.
As the 19th
century progressed and poetry became increasingly marginal, print opportunities
increased and there was the beginnings of a strange inversion: anything popular
could not be good, and anything good could not be popular. The fact so few people read your poems was not
due to your unreadable poems but due to a failure of the masses to appreciate your
genius. As Pierre Bourdieu pointed out, only those who do not rely on their art
for their income can hold such an attitude. Ezra Pound opined that anyone with an audience over five hundred could not be a true artist.
For ignorance things improved
with the advent of the public library and compulsory primary education. If you were
determined and had access to a library, you could educate yourself. It was the
way generations of the working class discovered reading. Even so, it’s hard to find time to read when
you’re grinding a twelve-hour shift, six days a week. Or working as an Agricultural labourer. Ask the ghost of John Clare.
Access to
publication was controlled by an old boys’ club. While women were not excluded, no matter how
good they were at their art, social constraints limited their subject matter
and its treatment. It’s easy to forget that female authors wrote some of the
most popular poetry of the 19th century. They have been forgotten before their male
contemporaries.
2) The situation has changed.
As far as
poetry in English is concerned, those days have gone. True, there’s an ugly strain in
modern educational thinking that would like to see them back. In publishing the old Boys network
now contains old Girls and an ability to parrot the fashionable ideologies and
adopt the acceptable positions are the new equivalent of the secret hand shake.
However, Today,
NOW, if you have internet access, if you’re reading this, you have effortless access
to the largest poetry library in history. Yes, there are still people who do
not have access. But I’m thinking about the Instagram poets, the bloggers, those
who post their poems to facebook or any other online platform.
Today, perhaps for the first time in history, for
an English speaker with online access, ignorance of poetry in English is entirely
optional. Anyone who can read this blog can, with a little patience and a bit
of effort, read Chaucer. That means he or she has access to 7 centuries of
poetry in English and it’s all online and can be accessed for free and you
don’t even have to get out of bed to read it.
3) I don't understand you when you say you’re ‘interested in
poetry’ or you’re a ‘poet’ but you don’t read poetry.
I have never met a good guitar player who didn’t listen to other guitar players.
How long
would it take to read one poem a day? If you read one poem a day, written
before you were born and if you did it for a year, and then went back and
reread the 12 you remembered, or liked, you’d have encountered more poems than generations
that preceded you ever did. You don’t need to read critics, just poems.
If you can’t
be bothered, or you’re not interested, why do you think you ‘like poetry’? How
can you call yourself 'a poet' when you have no idea or interest in the possibilities
of your art? Unless you are so arrogant that you believe that whatever you produce cannot be improved?
Not only do
you have access to the poetry of the past, you have access to publication and
you don’t need anyone’s approval or permission to post your poems. The days
when the old boys club and the academic elites could turn you down because you
were the wrong gender or race, or class, or you didn’t write in FSE or you
wrote about things they didn’t want to know about, have effectively gone. Today,
the opportunity is there for any poet to build an online following. And your online following, even if its only measured in hundreds, is liable to be larger than the sales of most books published by the 'poetry establishment'.
4) Therefore my question is: Why is
ignorance not only so popular but seen as a positive attribute?
Ignorance
of the art you claim to practice is not a mark of courage or a revolutionary
flag to march behind. It’s not a move in the class or gender war. You're not sticking it to the man. It’s now a choice. And if you choose; it’s self-centred, arrogant, narcissistic laziness. Narcissus never lead a
revolution. ignorance never lead to a rebirth of anything except the crass the
brutal and the ugly. And there’s enough of those around without
anyone needing to add to them.
