Brightest and best
William Scammell
POETRY REVIEW: NEW GENERATION POETS edited by Peter Forbes Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2, tel, 071 240 4810, £4,95, pp. 127 Should poetry be quiet or loud, pushed or ignored, popular or a happy secret? The more dignified/pompous members of the profession protest that poetry competi- tions, promotions, performances, media exposure and razzmatazz are at best an irrelevance, at worst a betrayal of all that poetry stands for. If its light wasn't meant to be diffused slowly, God would never have invented bushels, Arts Councils and Conservative governments.
They have a point, though it tends to get blunted by the fact that many of its devo- tees are mediocrities rationalising their own obscurity. In the other camp stands the 'most poets ignore most people' fac- tion, who want to turn a contingent means, popularity, into an end in itself, waving the philosopher's stone that turns quantity into quality. But this is fools' gold, even when flashed by Dennis Potter, who execrates Rupert Murdoch for his lowest-common- denominator tactics but fondly supposes that a work seen or read by millions is somehow intrinsically superior to one that reaches only hundreds or thousands. Popu- larity is neither a hallmark nor a stigma but a piece of luck. Some greats had it and some didn't. Southey prospered, Keats and Hopkins perished. Fay Weldon hogs the column inches, Dan Jacobson just gets on with it. Fame bloweth where it listeth. Sane writers, though not indifferent to its lure, know there are more important missions to expend their spirits on.
So we shouldn't get too excited, or too blimpish, about the occasional trumpet blast that breaks out over the annals of verse. This latest, bumper issue of Poetry Review is an excellent introduction to 2,0 `new generation' poets, all under 40, who will be descending on bookshops and other venues over the next month or so to display their talents. A good many of the males are wits, indebted to Paul Muldoon and a large reading habit. The women tend to delve thoughtfully into history and feeling, aided and abetted by the example of Elizabeth Bishop. Michael Hofmann is the best of the bunch, an established Faber poet who isn't really at home in this sort of PR exercise. See Acrimony and his new book, Corona, Corona. He is essentially a Modernist — an endangered species nowadays — who believes that a line should crackle with its own energy, fed by juxtaposition and the vertiginous excitement of arriving at a tone of voice exactly appropriate to the matter in hand. This sort of poetry forces your eye backwards along the line as well as for- wards, up as well as down, so that the narrative is Janus-faced, with a secret or psycho-history running alongside the official subject-matter like a live rail. Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell have already hit the publicity fleshpots. Armitage has bags of talent and charm, and has obviously touched a contemporary nerve. Maxwell, even more prolific and various, has been tagged with the 'young Auden' label and given a Masonic hand- shake by Brodsky and Walcott, which he probably has enough talent to outlive. Others to look out for include Lavinia Greenlaw, Sarah Maguire, Michael Donaghy, Ian Duhig and Susan Wicks. It's not possible to do any kind of justice to their talents in a sentence or two. All take the art seriously, all are capable of making You sit up joyously in your chair, like an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties.
Scots make up no less than eight of the chosen 20, a figure that might content the hardiest chauvinist, but Douglas Dunn can't bring himself to celebrate the fact without making up an imaginary slight committed on older Scottish poets. Some of the younger ones look to Hugh MacDiarmid, notably W. N. Herbert and Robert Crawford. This is understandable, and occasionally useful, but I suspect you'd get lynched if you pointed out that some parts of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle are a lot better than others, and that he became no less of a blusterer and a bully than Pound and Lewis. Herbert is fun, though, and so is the highly inventive Don Paterson. Kathleen Jamie, a precocious talent who published her first book at 21, has matured into one of the most accom- plished young poets in Britain. Jamie McKendrick is very fine, too, a subtle and rewarding poet in the traditional mould.
I mustn't omit some of the omissions. Where are George Szirtes, Oliver Reynolds, Peter Didsbury, Jo Shapcott, Selima Hill, Stephen Romer, Kit Wright, John Hartley Williams, Gerard Woodward, Anne Rouse, to name just a few? No doubt the age factor accounts for some, bad judg- ment for others. The whole 'new', 'age', `generation' business is as silly as the decade one, really, since poets hit their stride, and make or don't make their mark, at any age under the sun. In the course of blessing his flock the editor has some harsh words for 'the last gasp of [the] system of patronage', alleged- ly seen in Ian Hamilton's recent Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. This highmindedness is not unrelated, I suspect, to the fact that the Companion's entry on Poetry Review is insufficiently awestruck. Forbes's talk of 'instant obsoles- ence' sits oddly with some of his own enthusiasms, including a two-page profile of the truly appalling John Hegley, com- pared with whom McGonagall is Abraham Cowley. Storms in teacups go with the territory, of course. Craig Raine once confided that poets are jealous of their prestige because it is their sole possession. Money and fame go to novelists and playwrights but every- one retains a residual, atavistic awe of the shamans of language. Everyone, that is, except the BBC and all other televisual brainstormers. There is an abundance of talent out there and absolutely no reason why it shouldn't flourish on the airwaves and bloom in a dozen studios. Even a half- wit could do it. But does it happen? It does not. Instead we get the odd gobbet on Radio 1 or 2, between pop songs. Now that really is a betrayal. As Don Paterson sagely remarks, 'Would Eliot do this? Nah.'
'1 was ruminating on the company's long-term prospects this morning, while shaving.'
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