THE EDUCATION
OF DESIRE
I have set out to write as simply as I can what I
believe is happening in the kind of poetry I write and in the kinds of poetry I
believe to be really important today.
Secondly I want to try and
explain why I think this writing is revolutionary.
Today’s Poetry
and Advertising
It is impossible for anybody who wants to write a
poetry that is politically revolutionary to write in the way most poems in
Britain are written.
This poetry no longer works,
though it wins poetry competitions.
If you think of all the
things that are said to make poetry what it is - things like rhyme, rhythm,
alliteration, etc - then you will today find them on any list of tricks used by
advertising agencies in making adverts.
What once belonged to poetry
has been stolen.
Some poets don’t worry about
this.
But it means that a lot of
poetry today will look like adverts. It
sells not a product (‘Right for baby; right for you’) but a moral (‘What
survives of us is love’).
It is often in the form of a
little story that moves towards its catch phrase. It may use flashy comparisons.
Think of adverts on the TV:
so many of them are like that.
It is impossible to write
revolutionary poetry like this.
Revolutionary
Poetry
The writer who wants to do something different has
to write in new ways.
The poetry may seem
strange. It may be difficult to
understand.
There may seem to be bits of
it missing. There may be problems in
putting all its parts together; things may not seem to follow on.
It may be difficult to see who’s
speaking.
It may seem as though there
should be a story there, but there isn’t.
There are lots of other new
ways of writing.
The kind of difficulty I’m
not talking about are difficulties that can be solved with the dictionary or
the encyclopaedia.
I’m talking about
difficulties that stop the process of reading, or upset your reading habits.
The very use of all these
odd ways of writing will be an attack on the simple ways of thinking you see in
adverts, for example, but which seem to go on everywhere.
It is a way of criticising
the way society uses language, the way it thinks.
This is not the same as
writing a poem about pollution. The poem
about pollution might end up looking like an advert by Greenpeace, full of
‘tricks’ of persuasion.
Not all advertising is
bad. But the poem that tries to look
like an advert is bad.
What the
Reader Has To Do
Adverts are easy to read, even when they seem
strange at first; a lot of poems written today are easy to read. But most of the poetry I am thinking of is
not easy to read. You can’t consume it
in one go.
This makes the reader work
harder.
It does something else too:
it makes the reader’s work as important as that of the writer.
It is the reader who makes
the poem - or rather: each individual has to make the poem, to complete it, for
his or herself.
The reader is no longer a
passive consumer. (Again, think of
adverts: although you can analyse them, you don’t usually have to work to
understand their main message, which is usually: Buy this Product or Stop this
Pollution.)
Some readers don’t like
this.
They prefer a poetry that
they can immediately understand, that exhausts itself in one go (or seems
to). This sort of poetry wins poetry
competitions.
Making a New
World
Another result of the poem not being written in the
language of advertising or the language of our society is that it is a thing
apart from it.
It exists independently of
the controls of our society. It must
start out from the world, because that’s where the writer is, where language
is. He or she must create with bits and
pieces of the world.
But the writer will
rearrange everything so that out of the bits and pieces of this world, he or
she will make a new world.
This is not easy to explain
but it’s as though the writer is breaking up a jigsaw puzzle and making a new
pattern from it (but not the nice ordered picture on the box!).
This new world might not be
a better world. It might only exist as a
few disconnected words making a new combination.
But by saying something new,
by making another world from out of the bits and pieces of language found in
the real world, that is a way of criticising the way things are.
In a way it says, things
must change.
Or perhaps it just says:
things could be different.
This is also what the
revolutionary says.
So therefore this way of
writing will be a little bit revolutionary, although it will never tell you how things might change.
What Happens
to the Reader
This poetry may be an attack on society as it is, on
its ways of thinking.
But it can also have a positive
aspect.
This is linked to the notion
of a more active reader.
At first sight it may seem
hard on the reader to make everything so difficult for him or her.
But I think it can also be a
delightful thing to be allowed as much freedom as the writer, to read
creatively, to fill in gaps, to be left to decide who is speaking, etc.
It is no longer just what a
poem means that is important. It is also
what a poem does to the reader.
The poem may tell you a lot,
but it won’t tell you everything. It
will leave you working.
Adverts and most poems try
to tell you everything. This is
important because what they are trying to do is to fulfil your inner
desires. In the advert’s case you’ll
have to buy the product of course. Such
and such beauty product will make you perfect.
Romantic fiction tries to
fulfil desire. So does pornography.
They leave you apparently
satisfied and no longer needing to think.
They are full of old ideas.
The new poetry doesn’t
fulfil you. It leaves you with still a
lot of thinking to be done. There will
always be more and more to think about.
Poetry is the education of
desire.
It might make you confused,
mixed up. But that’s all right. When you’re trying to understand something
difficult you do get confused for a bit.
And people are all mixed up when they feel an emotion they’ve never
experienced before: like sexual desire, for example.
At best, the poetry will
change the reader, make him or her think in new ways, not simply what the
society wants you to think.
Or even what the writer
thinks.
Reading is no longer a
guessing game to find out what the writer thinks; you do the thinking.
This is part of the
positive, revolutionary function of this writing: let’s repeat it: the
education of desire.
To change the wants and
desires of the people of the world would be the beginning of a revolution of
sorts.
Writing has its small, but
significant, part to play.
11 September
1988 The Education of Desire (Ship of Fools, 1988)
AFTERWORD
My task in The Education of Desire was to re-present in popular form for
students of A Level English Literature the poetics I had developed over some
years, and which I had found relatively easy to reiterate, in my own
intellectual shorthand. But I knew my
audience; intelligent but unread. It
would take at least an hour to explain and exemplify ‘defamiliarisation’
alone. It is easy to say that the reader
of this poetry becomes an active co-producer of the final meaning of a text, as
she or he is drawn into the invention of the poem and forget that this notion
is an extremely unusual one for my students; and - it has been made clear to me
- for more sophisticated readers.
Reading a poem - and new writing in prose too - may well be an education
of activated desire, but the need to explain this must, initially, avoid
references to Lyotard’s essay, ‘The Critical Function of the Work of Art (Driftworks), from which this idea
derives. For an extension of its
argument see Christopher Beckett’s ‘Anxiety and Desire in the Poetic Machine’ (First Offense 5) and my own response to
his comments on The Education of Desire,
‘Re-Working the Work: Pausing for Breath’ (First
Offense 6).
This piece, along with others, on, of, or about
poetics, including the piece mentioned above, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics.
Details here: Pages:
The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
July 1990
