New Lines.

Ezra Pound's minimalist, imagist masterpiece (if you take his word for it).I’m currently putting together a package of the poems I’ve written in the past year or so for submission. It’s pretty demoralising work, partly because there’s such a small chance of getting anything accepted and partly because the magazines seem, to me at least, so full of verbally constipated, wilfully obscure writing.

When I sent out my first batch of poems, and spent a lot of time trying to find magazines where I thought my stuff might fit, I was convinced that this indicated a failure in the editorial process: if every magazine was trying to find something unique to say, and there was no consensus on what constituted new writing, every editorial board was simply imposing its own arbitrary subjective standards upon an indifferent world, thereby creating a vast and meaningless slew of subjectivity in which everyone occupied their own little corner without recourse or redress to anyone else.

I still worry that this is true, but I’ve had cause to change my thinking a little. It now seems to me that one of the main arguments for pursuing new writing is that there’s no point in repeating what has been said, since employing the same modes of expression will fail to penetrate the shell of cynicism we all habitually build around ourselves. To pursue new forms, then, is not self-indulgence but a commitment to the best possible realisation of the art-form in question, being fearless, unexpected and, regardless of its subject matter, celebratory of life.  

Of course, the commitment to finding new ways of expressing oneself carries with it its own set of problems – problems which are remarkably similar to those faced by conceptual art. From Duchamp onwards, anyone could appropriate an object and claim it was art; the value of the art then depended solely on the audience’s willingness to credit that statement with value, without reference to craft or style. 

Larkin was first published in the New Lines anthology alongside Thom Gunn, John Wain and Kingsley Amis. People nowadays think of Larkin as formal stylist, but of course, his style was a deliberate reaction to (and rejection of) the thirties poets, particularly his erstwhile heroes Auden and Lawrence. Here he is with his friend and editor, Anthony Thwaite, essaying a most cheeky grin.The same accusation can be laid against poetry from imagism onwards, because once people like Eliot and Pound started deconstructing language and literary form, the linguistic disruption of the surface became, to a degree, the meaning as well as the delivery mechanism of meaning. The problem with this is that free verse and its ilk are relatively easy to reproduce, and that opens the door to writing which has all the hallmarks of seriousness (the linguistic contortion, the modernist devotion to ellipses, fragments and the unsaid) without any real conviction or depth.  

For conceptual art to work, the concept has to be good. The same applies to poetry – and yet, so little of the poetry I’ve read in the last few days has felt conceptually informed. There’s no voice that demands to be heard, and little or no intimation of depth beneath the troubled surface. Very often it’s simply one striking metaphor turned through d every angle, or the poem is so fragmented, so riddled with dense and coruscating layers of allusion, that there’s no way of knowing what the hell it’s on about, or caring.

So where does that leave us? I suppose it boils down not merely to forcing oneself to tell the truth, but to finding new ways of formulating the truth (which is, of course, another way of saying that you’re going to put yourself through sheer bloody hell). And, of course, you can’t have one half of the axiom without the other, or the whole thing automatically falls into irrelevance (either predictable truth or specious novelty). Also, like all syllogisms, it’s not one hundred per cent watertight: there are always going to be other ways of getting out good writing or telling the truth, whatever that is.

But when you read a poet like David Harsent, you can’t help thinking that the marriage of truth and original expression really do serve to create the most wonderful, exciting writing. I just finished reading his ‘Two poems after Yannis Ritsos’ in the LRB and, man, are those good. Full of light and air, yet totally haunting, he’s clearly a master of his own voice, and of giving his ideas and phrases enough room to breathe and, consequently, shine. 

Here’s an excerpt of one, given with due notice of the copyright of its owner and the London Review of Books, etc. 

from ‘Helen’

Why do the dead stay here? No one wants them.
Why have they got themselves up in their Sunday best,
their carefully polished shoes never quite touching the floor?
Why do they act as if they owned the place, taking the fireside chairs,
leaving taps in the bathroom running, leaving soap
to dissolve in the tub? The servants go among them with brooms
and dusters and never notice a thing, except now and then a maid
will laugh and her laughter is caught and held like a tethered bird.