As a ‘poet-critic’ I have often
wondered what the relationship of one function to the other is in this hybrid
construction. I have always felt somewhat distrustful of readings of my poems
that attempt to link the terms of my criticism – for example, the Levinasian
distinction between the qualities of ‘saying’ and the qualities of ‘the said’
as outlined in my critical book
The
Poetry of Saying – with particular poems of mine. (See
here). I stopped
Christopher Madden - nicely I hope - trying to make this move in this interview
here. (I am probably
just as guilty in my eager desire to crack the nut of the difficulties of
innovative poetry by raiding and reading the literary critical formulations of
poet-critics as poetics, I know!)
I believe that my criticism
must inform the poetics – the
speculative writerly discourse that I have with myself in my journal, with
others in explicit poetics pieces, and perhaps in this post I’m writing now –
but I don’t particularly know how. Indeed, one of the reasons I value writerly
poetics in the terms I have defined it (see
here but perhaps even more so
here), is precisely because
writers cannot read their own work (as witnessed by the centrality of the
communal workshop in creative writing pedagogy). The poetics may use some of the
same counters: I have used the term ‘creative linkage’ to describe the kind of
supercharged collage practices one finds in
Gravity
as a Consequence of Shape by Allen Fisher, and I have used it of my own
poem
The Lores where I
self-consciously ‘mix’ different linguistic ‘tracks’ as though I were producing
a sound recording, but I am not sure of the relationship between the two
usages. It’s not for me to say.
The transformations I am going to
trace in a practice-led narrative I am writing will not touch on
those kinds of relations because I believe I cannot access them accurately: in
short, I cannot be my own critic, for the reasons I have just expressed, and
also because of a certain English reserve which dictates that to speak of one’s
creative work is a particular kind of false special pleading, this, despite the
fact that I find it a useful practice for ‘apprentice’ writers within the
academy; for writers in the wild, as I call them, it is a different question.
Part of this thinking, or rather
somewhere in the background, is a very strange passage I read in the excellent
Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010,
which I posted about
here, by the usually perspicacious Peter Barry. Writing of
long-poems and projects (like Allen and Roy Fishers’), he says: ‘The major
examples of this kind of enterprise look likely to remain unrivalled, partly
because the poets who would undertake such a project will probably now have
full-time university posts in creative writing.’ (236) Though he makes an
exception for Zoe Skoulding, he nevertheless says she’s ‘a university-embedded
poet in the pressured present, one who is necessarily engaged in a wide range
of project grants and collaborative work of various kinds’ (238) This may be so
(I’m not!) but just the arrival of Gavin Selerie’s massive
Hariot Double on the day after I read this, tells the lie. It also
reminds us that there are writers outside the academy (it is my ambition to become
one). It’s as if Peter only meets poets at academic conferences (poets outside
can’t get in, they can’t afford it!) and that creativity is inevitably wrapped
up with practice-led research and all that caper (and it is a caper). I have
had some funding for my writing (which I gratefully acknowledge), but these were for
projects already underway, but I like to keep the
energy of them a long way away from the ‘pressured present’, and I
urge other poets (and writers and artists generally) to do the same. Only buy
time. (I’m not even going to visit ‘impact’, but I’ve seen some gutless work
produced under its supposed guise: willing itself to be art, willing itself to
be relevant, quite useless in imaginative efficacy, and therefore useless to
the social polity.)
I saw a poet give a reading the
other day and it was like a practice-led presentation, which ‘reads’ very oddly
for audience members not used to it, once the PhD is finished: it feels like
the special pleading I suspect above. It’s a habit worth kicking. In the piece
I am writing tracing the writing of fourteen variations on a ‘translation’ I
made of the third sonnet of Petrarch, (see
here and
here) a partly conceptual, partly
expressive sequence, under the sign of Oulipo, but informed by earlier poetic
interests of my own, I need to avoid this kind of self-explication. (‘Poetics don’t
explain!’ sez Charles Bernstein.) If I even dare to judge that
Petrarch 3 is at once impersonal and
personal, if I declare that it is at once hugely derivative and original, my
thoughts above must halt my interpretive impulse here and dampen it to
aspiration. I can only hope for such effects… Poetics is aspiration. (As well
as provocation, and all the other things I’ve said it is over the years.)
*
FOOTNOTE: '...talked - I think - about a lack of proper
criticism, not literary critical, but of immediate response internal to the
'poetry scene' (shorthand I know), particularly with all the new writers
emerging as they are. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far: all these
'practice-led' 'creative writers' (they use this terminology whether in or out
of the academy) have a poetics but there's no critical apparatus to evaluate
the efficacy of both poetics and poetry. Without it, everything sinks to the
bottom. Especially with conceptual writing which is so easy to do (badly).' (From my diary 30th August 2016)
*
For my own recent project, and book
The Meaning of Form... see a hublink to various posts
here.
For those who can buy The
Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or order it for
libraries, here are the places
Here is some book data:
eBook ISBN
978-3-319-34045-6
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-34044-9
