SUNDAY, 18 AUGUST 2024

This has been a good week for me. Three of my poems have been published in an online site called Mediterranean Poetry. https://www.odyssey.pm/. I’ve also been fairly creative.

Other than that, I’ve spent a lot of time researching possible markets which might be receptive to my brand of poem, so I’ve been reading some of the works in online poetry magazines, and, although I wasn’t expecting a lot of ABAB, I was shocked to find very few poems that used a ‘traditional’ rhyme pattern. Nor did a large majority of poems have any kind of regular metre. Only one of the magazines categorically ruled out these things (although several stated a preference for free verse and what they termed ‘experimentation’), but the reality was that ‘traditional’ poetic features were largely absent.

Although many sites stated that they were looking for original, innovative, and groundbreaking poems, I found many of the poems I read depressingly similar. They generally avoided ‘poetic’ language － the range of adjectives and verbs which were once the staple of poetry － in what felt like a declaration of their down-to-earth naturalness, with none of that elitist arty-farty crap. This was allied to what seemed to be an attempt to avoid any kind of artificial cadence, the rhymes and rhythm of ‘traditional’ verse. The favoured punctuation was often the dash and the slash － no colons or semi-colons for these tell-it-like-it-is poets － in what I assume they saw as an innovative use, especially of the slash or double slash. So innovative that I read about five poems that used it in this way: the dog//cried out//and the man in the car//who was wearing a dress//ate his burger (the double slash here does not represent a sentence break; it represents a trendy but meaningless double slash).

There also seemed to be a deliberate rejection of concision to revel in its verbose opposite: lines that spread out towards the edge of the page and ended when there was no more white space so another line began. The main structuring element which did exist was the use of anaphora at the beginning of lines, repetition of a word or a phrase followed by a long string of words that lacked any effort to sound beautiful or rhythmic, which often in fact gave the impression that these things were deliberately expunged if, by accident, they somehow appeared.

These linguistic features were mirrored in the content, which flitted from image to image rather than focused on one or two central images or metaphors which might serve as the integrating heart of the poem. Content was often formulaic and predictable and, damningly in view of the claim that this kind of poetry is dangerous, it was utterly safe. I’ll use one of my own poems to illustrate my point, because I don’t want to single out any individual poet for what was a collective conformism. My poem, A Cemetery in Scotland, describes men cruising for sex in an Edinburgh cemetery. The idea that anyone who reads a lot of poetry would find this subversive or challenging or threatening is utterly ludicrous. Fucking in a crypt, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. But imagine I wrote a poem saying what a great thinker Jordan Peterson is (which I promise you I won’t) － I feel sure that would ruffle a few feathers among the new literati. How very dare he. Anyway, I found little of interest as I worked my way through these poems; they had all the predictability of an action movie. Oppression and self-identity seemed de rigueur in terms of content and a mushy leftish sentimentality the mandatory politics.

I can’t help but see a lot of this as a reflection of the MTV generation and the internet world of surfing and clicks and links. Just as scenes in movies now tend to be much shorter than they were in the days of classic Hollywood, as if boredom might set in among the audience if three seconds passes without any change of camera angle or people rushing through corridors as they speak, most poems now have a kind of restlessness that alights on an image for a very short time and then moves quickly on to another, like items in a sales catalogue. It is the poetry of consumer capitalism from people who claim to be opposed to consumer capitalism.

I can picture the rolling eyes － the sooner this almost dead white male pops his clogs, the better, so we don’t have to read this antediluvian crap. But the idea that contemporary poetry threatens anyone is at best a fiction, and at worst a downright lie. This poetry is not subversive, not original, not groundbreaking. People like Stein, e.e.cummings, Lautréamont, Apollinaire, Pound, the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Whitman, Ginsberg, Bukowski, were doing a lot of these things at least sixty years ago and generally much further back, often taking risks which went way beyond what our timid contemporaries are offering.

This isn’t unique to poetry － the same is true of the art world. Painting was pronounced dead by trendy young things at least thirty years ago, and yet it survives. It’s just that artists working in ‘traditional’ styles don’t get rich and they certainly don’t win the Turner Prize. That is reserved for artists who pretend to despise the moneymen while making sure to implant their tongues in the nearest available orifice, all in the name of irony of course. At least the poetry world avoids the worst of this hypocrisy, if only because there’s far less money to be made since there’s no unique product to buy and sell for millions. The new conformism in poetry seems more to do with a need to be au fait and cutting-edge than with making a buck (or a million).

Yes, I am an almost dead white male, and I’m sure I sound cynical and old-hat. But I’m not calling for poetry to return to identikit verse of contrived metre and rhyme; I don’t want any kind of identikit verse. In this sense I have to hold up my hands and admit I’m a consumer capitalist, too, who believes in a pluralist marketplace. I want the same poetic world as the editors of most of these mags claim they want: a place where a thousand blossoms can bloom with lots of different colours and shapes and fragrances. I dislike this unadmitted conformism not because I want to return to dull formalism, and not even because it makes it much harder for me to publish my work. I dislike it because it rests on the flattering lie that these contemporary poets are risk-takers and pioneers. They’re not. And while art is in one sense a glorious lie, it abhors insincerity.

I have been placing ‘traditional’ within quotation marks throughout this blog because the reality is that what people generally mean when they use this word is no longer our poetic tradition. Free verse without rhyme or metre and with strictly delimited content is the norm of the new poetic establishment, and a lot of it is as revolutionary as Barbie. The least the new elite who claim to hate elitism could do is admit this fact.