BOOKS

Lament for the makers

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

The verse-receptive audience now covers a remarkably wide spectrum. The Times has written 'the situation now for modern poetry is healthier than it has been for many years . . . A sickly, precious minority art has been transformed into something robust and vigorous. The maker of verses again has fire in his belly'. This was written a propos the verse-reading movement, whose success has prompted Eric Walter White (who might fairly be described, in friendly Swiftian terms, as a poetitomaster) to cry out, again in the Times: 'It is possible that critics may decide that there is something missing in the idea of the masterpiece as such, and prefer to base their judgments on more variable and sensitised standards'.

Under pressure, Mr White freely ad- mitted that this sentence was 'rather un- satisfactory'. What he had meant, he wrote, was that different kinds of poetry require different kinds of judgment; but this is hardly new, and the kinds of poetry he exemplified—poetry for the printed page, poetry for declamation, poetry written to be read against a musical background or accompaniment—have existed throughout time. Thus in the Odyssey, presumably the written record of an oral performance, Homer seems to be superior to Adrian Mitchell; Wyatt has a possible edge on Christopher Logue in musically accom- panied poetry; and so on. Mr White's ad- monition to critics means nothing and adds nothing, and as such must be taken as an unconscious plea to them to abandon any critical standards that they previously have been misguidedly vicious enough to apply. In this democratic age, he seems to be saying, we can do without everything but our friendly poetry-fun.

All this seems admirable if one does not actually examine the quality of the verse that is now being mass-produced. Poetry is coming into its own at last. John Smith, a popular performer of his own verse and a contributor to Jeremy Robson's Poems from Poetry and Jazz in Concert (Souvenir Press, 30s), is robust, vigorous and fiery- bellied, and beside him the sickly, unhealthy and precious minority figures of Blake and Coleridge are pale. Obviously:

I am ordinary, and have been fearful of dying: But now I perceive With a wry acceptance that so much of me has departed That there is little left to suffer.

The answer must be that the audiences do not really listen, or that they do not know how to listen.

It [Mr Logue's lack of care] is more

terrible than my despair Over losing her. The night always vast, Grows enormous without her. and My-comforter's tongue talking about her Is a red fox barred by ivory, well, Does it matter I love too weak [sic] to

keep her?

This is part of a `Blues Lament' from Christopher Logue, at present an official

satirist. Here are lines from verses by Brian Patten in his second book, Notes to the Hurrying Man (Allen and Unwin. 20s). Mr Patten has been hailed by Mr Robert Nye (and many others) as a poet 'of great lyrical tenderness informed or questioned by an intelligence that would be cynical were it not so deeply committed to its own findings ... taut, beautiful, and exact, with a haunt- ing movement ...a very nearly perfect command of the various ways of saying' (I quote at length. uncynically, in order to give a very nearly perfect example of the sort of criticism I assume that Mr White is pleading for):

Born into rivers of light rain; were we on a raft of apples first or perhaps at the edge of a clearing where through mist we saw small creatures eat their ways into dawn.

In another poem Mr Patten identifies him- self with a cowboy:

I've an old bullet in me, how long it has been there I cannot remember. Here conies the boat on the teeming river. How long it has teemed here I cannot remember.

I have deliberately quoted, here, what apparently is widely acceptable and thus gives heart to some of those who would like to see poetry a more popular and con- sequently 'healthy' art. There is plenty more of it. It seems clear that it is no more likely to survive than pop-songs; that it bears little relationship to poetry or to the real problems that face serious modern poets. It is written carelessly, in well-worn clichés, and entirely for oral performance.

The revival of public interest in verse- readings. then, has no bearing upon poetry, the ultimate test of which lies in its ability to arouse an interest and a response on the printed page (however much this may be intensified by hearing it read). People do not now flock to poetry-readings because the poets are better than they were twenty years ago (or because they are worse), but because it is a fashion. Many serious poets take part; but the fashion has also spawned many new and unserious versifiers, as well as encouraged neo-Georgians like Mr John Smith or advertising copywriters like Mr Peter Porter CI am only the image I can force upon the town') to continue writing.

Of course there are also serious, talented and thoughtful poets, and these arc less tempted than Mr Smith or Mr Porter to take rcfuge in a general atmosphere of mediocrity. One such is Mr Ian Hamilton, who was serious enough some years ago to

call himself Peter Marsh when engaging in intelligent, aggressive and destructive criticism. The criticism of Peter Marsh was acute enough to discern that English poetry was at a critical stage of development. It saw that in order to achieve a memorably personal and valid voice, something essen- tial in this modern age, poetry needed to reach beyond its traditional limitations but it harshly deplored irresponsible pseudo- avant-gardism and ignorant charlatanism.

Mr Hamilton's principles are clearly re- vealed in a recent collection of essays by various critics from his magazine, The Re- view, called The Modern Poet (Macdonald, 35s). This is modern criticism almost at its best, aware of the problems posed to poets by a society in transition from one culture to another not yet properly understood, and trying to interpret them largely in these terms. The chief fault of the collection (with certain exceptions) is its lack of humour and its corresponding pomposity. One does not need to be as stiff as Gabriel Pearson, for example, who opens his essay on Berryman: 'At a very primary level John Berryman's poetry worries me'.

Now, in Poetry Introduction t (Faber and Faber, 25s cloth, 7s paper), an anthology of nine new or newish poets, we have a substantial collection of Mr Hamilton's own poems. And here we see a good example of a poet who is so keen to excise what his acute critical intelligence has discerned as vices—archaisms, the false neatness of the 'well-made poem', sentimentality—that he has lost his poetic energy. By far the most talented as well as the most fastidious poet of the nine, he is at present a casualty of his own cautiousness: so afraid is he of feeling, and therefore of energy, that even when he has to record it. he mutes it by retreating into an elliptical and even a semi- gnomic manner.

Beside this, beside the sadly effete. con- trivedly humorous manner of Alan Brown- john in his latest and thinnest collection, Sand grains on a Tray (Macmillan, 30s), be- side the neat and attractive traditionalism of Seumus Heaney in Door into Dark (Faber and Faber. 15s). American poetry seems rawly energetic. John Berryman is much more frequently an appallingly had poet than ever (to take the young English poet with perhaps the most potential) Mr Hamilton would allow himself to be. He is also much more powerful and memor- ably personal than Mr Hamilton would dare to try to be. The comparison, though in some ways unfair, does emph:tsise that the partial but continuing victory of creativity over critical Alexandrianism that has occurred in America has not occurred in Great Britain.

The ironic fact, not acceptable to the majority, is that you cannot help poetry except by creating conditions of anomie (which can safely be left to politicians and their advisors); a society in which poetry is loved by everyone is a contradiction in terms, since poetry is—among other things —about the reasons for the impossibility of such a society. Poetry is still a private thing —for both poet and reader- -in a public world. About the efforts of those who want to make it public, and therefore turn it into something else, one may be either polite-- or truthful and rude, spoiling the fun.

The lesson seems to be that no one can properly experience poetry --with all that this implies—who is not prepared both to resist it as a popular art and at the same time to jettison critical over-cautiousness. If it is to survive it must perform the

miracle (it has performed miracles before) of expressing coherently what seems to us at present the incoherence of our socially and culturally transitory condition.