Some of the essays here will have been included in the book, Digging for Water, and then featured as Essay of the Month. However, I will also be writing some new essays on art and literature and they will be placed here, as well as in the Archive, after an initial appearance in LATEST/SUNDAY UPDATE.

CONTENTS

ART & MATERIALITY

When I discuss painting with my Chinese artist friend, Jiaxuan Yi, I am always struck by how much more mindful he is of its material base. While I can look at a picture and place it within a school or tradition, and even offer some comments about things like composition, I have no personal experience at all of the act of painting, so I can never get close to his awareness of a picture as a physical object materially created in space and the process that this involves. In the west, this usually means applying paint onto a rectangle or square of canvas or wood or paper, but in forms like fresco or mosaic or graffiti a wall may provide the base, while in other cultures, such as the Chinese, a scroll has been traditional. Nor, especially if we broaden our thinking beyond painting, does the material used have to be paint: it can be glass or marble or stone or wood. But whatever the medium, it is hard to escape the sheer physicality of painting and sculpture.

This is obviously true of working in oils, as Jiaxuan Yi does: a medium which offers a textural quality that doesn’t exist to the same level in alternatives such as watercolour and acrylic. I remember the first time I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and my total shock at the sheer physicality of his paintings, how different they looked from in my book, and how much had been lost in reproducing them on the page. I couldn’t begin to imagine how Van Gogh’s hands and body had moved as he applied the paint (I suspect, though, that Jiaxuan Yi could) but I recognised that the meaning of oil paintings lay not only in things like theme and composition and colour but also in how they have been physically executed. For most of us nowadays our knowledge of paintings comes from seeing them in books or on screens. This massively reduces the importance of brushstrokes and texture. But in painting, the medium is partly the message.

One of the problems I personally have with the AI art I have seen is its lack of any sense of texture. Maybe the day will arrive when a robot arm is attached which can reproduce the movements of a human artist and create this physicality (although this might tempt the question, ‘Why bother?’, when gifted humans can already do it so well). But at the moment the effect of AI paintings is limited to their surface and what is immediately visible, and the ones I have seen always have a certain banality, a lack of inner content and meaning, a sense of things randomly thrown together (and with much less success in doing that than the Surrealists managed). When painters put oils on canvas, they place part of themselves there at the same time, a sort of autograph of how they work and who they are. AI cannot do this.

This textural signature is especially true of painters like Van Gogh or Rubens or de Kooning, where the application of the paint is an important part of the work, but less true of some other artists, especially those working in media other than oils. Various movements in post-war painting – Pop Art, Op Art, colour field, post-painterly abstractionism – reduced the importance of the textural aspects of painting in favour of more obviously optical qualities such as colour and shape. This was supported critically by Greenberg’s advocacy of two-dimensionality and flatness as the most desirable qualities of a canvas. The influence of yet another movement, Minimalism, was more complex, especially in sculpture, since it often highlighted the material used, but tended to favour materials such as steel or fluorescent light which lacked graininess and therefore the work sometimes seemed almost to aim for a removal of texture, the kind of unreal smoothness now seen in AI art.

Conceptual Art was yet another train to leave the station at around this time, although Duchamp had laid down the track before the First World War. It would be simplistic to call Conceptual Art anti-material since at some point a physical object is usually constructed, and, let’s face it, there are few things more physical than Hirst’s shark. But the principle at the heart of Conceptual Art was that the original idea was the most important thing and often it didn’t matter who actually physically created the final work, a process which could be handed over to craftspeople, or that the idea alone was enough and it wasn’t even essential that the work took on physical form. This gave great hope to someone like me with poor hand-eye co-ordination since I too could theoretically become an artist if my concept was innovative enough, but it also did much to remove the physical body of the artist from the art-work. Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, for example, consists of the text of a dictionary definition of a chair, a physical chair, and a photograph of the same physical chair (which was a ‘found object’ rather than one constructed by the artist). All very clever, and perhaps thought-provoking, but at the level of the material object not very aesthetically interesting.

Another important idea of the time was a desire to create art that was unique and ephemeral, and which therefore couldn’t become merely a product to be bought and sold on a rampant art market. Performance Art grew out of the happenings of the 1960s (although again there were precedents long before in the cabarets of the Futurists and Dadaists) and was deliberately and proudly disposable. In theory, once the performance had finished, nothing remained, so here was an art in which materiality was permanently sacrificed. In reality, though, some way was found of retaining the work, usually in photographs and videos with their impersonal, virtual quality; Art theory was all very well, but no one was going to let it stop the cash registers of the art market merrily ringing.

It can be argued, therefore, that all these various attempts to transcend the materiality of painting and sculpture failed and these art forms never quite managed to shed a recalcitrant physicality. The art form that I work in – literature – is much more amenable to anti-materialism. In one sense, of course, a physical object will always remain, the black letters on white paper or on a screen, but these become invisible as we read through them to get to the meaning. In fact, we can probably never see these squiggles and lines in the alphabet of our mother tongue as physical objects stripped of meaning. And even in oral traditions without books or paper, materiality exists in the form of sound waves. If Art grasps at the transcendental, it must always do so through the physical.

The common idea that literature allows a greater potential than painting for escaping the physical, however, seems a reasonable claim. This does not mean, though, that writers in some way escape the material; rather we aim to conjure up a sort of virtual materiality by placing images of physical things in the minds of readers or listeners. This may partly explain why there are so many ‘literary’ words that hardly exist outside of novels or poems: for example, the myriad ways of describing how someone moves or speaks. A key function of these literary words is to guide the imagination of readers and build up a material reality in their minds. But ultimately it is largely up to readers what that reality looks like. The writer can narrow down their freedom – for example, the reader of William Carlos Williams can’t make his wheelbarrow purple or yellow – but can never control every aspect of what the reader sees in the way that a painter can the viewer, so the reader remains free to see the wheelbarrow as beaten and rusty or shiny and spanking new.

Working in a material art form, and creating a physical object to be looked at, painters, especially those whose work is representational and realistic, restrict the freedom of their viewers much more than writers do, just as the director of a film or a stage play restricts the freedom of the audience in comparison with someone reading a playscript (although Victorian playwrights, who often wrote to be read, tried to control their readers by means of copious stage directions, which is why I personally find Shaw almost impossible to read). Furthermore, painters deliberately use elements such as composition and perspective and colour to direct the eyes of their viewers, to the point where it can often take an effort of will to work against this and look at a painting in a way that the artist doesn’t want us to. The reader of a novel or poem has much more freedom to mentally roam.

Reading is an activity that happens in time. There is no equivalent in literature to standing back from a painting or poster and seeing it as a whole; while I can remember a poem or novel as a whole after the event of reading it, I can’t experience it that way as I read it. I’m not suggesting that painting, at least representational painting, totally lacks a temporal element. A summer landscape by Constable contains a sort of memory of what that landscape looked like in the spring and how it will go on to look in the autumn and winter, and a portrait contains the history and the future of the sitter. But the moment of the painting is a snapshot, or a still from a movie. Time is frozen and the viewer is granted access to that one moment only. Literature is much more fluid as readers work their way through a novel or poem and so the experience of reading is less constrained.

Literature is also generally more comfortable about entering the realm of the intellect. There are definitely painters of ideas: many of the 20^th century’s abstract artists, for example, and also some of the Surrealists. But these ideas are couched in the visual. Consider, for example, the work of Magritte. Yes, he teases us with philosophical questions and paradoxes but he does this through images rather than argument. Literature can get much closer to discourse and ‘pure’ thought, as in some of the didactic poetry of the 18^th century. A poem can be composed almost entirely of abstract words and the grammar words to put them together; our tendency to see physical objects like faces or mountains or lakes even in a triangle or a streak of paint works against this when looking at a picture.

Maybe in literature it makes sense to talk of Saussurean signifier and signified, while in painting the Piercean distinction between icon, index and symbol is more useful as a critical tool. Saussure, not surprisingly as a linguist, focused on the signified as a kind of idea (his ‘bracketing of the referent’), whereas Pierce, as a Pragmatist philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and general polymath, included the ‘real’ physical object in his system. Painting, especially representational work, tends to the iconic simply because the things painted look like objects in real life. However, it also uses indexical features such as the vanishing point or diagonals to guide the viewer’s gaze, while medieval religious work included symbols to tell us which saint is depicted and memento mori paintings had their skulls, hour glasses and candles. Poetry, on the other hand, lacking the materiality of painting, generally makes much more use of the symbol and often extends this into broader metaphor.

In this essay, I have argued that the reader of fiction or poetry has a greater freedom of imagination than the viewer of a painting, and that literature is intrinsically less material. I would like to end, though, by briefly returning to my introduction and how Jiaxuan Yi understands painting much more than a non-practitioner like me ever can simply because he paints. There is a worrying trend to over-theorise in all of the arts nowadays. Artists themselves are partly to blame for this, with their prefaces and their manifestos. The huge expansion of academia and a world where one’s salary is dependent on intellectual analysis of artistic praxis is another reason (although this may now go into reverse as universities close their courses in the arts). The problem is that this often leads to a criticism which underplays the importance of the physical nature of an art work and the opportunities and limitations that necessarily arise from its material base. Abstract concepts, ideologies, historical categories, biographical trivia and a stream of endless ‘isms’ often drown out the role of the day-to-day experience of working artists and their familiarity with paints or rhyme patterns or camera shots or musical instruments. I’m aware of the irony of my saying this since my essays here are largely theoretical, but we underestimate these daily material realities of our art at great cost to our overall understanding of it.

WRITING HAIKU

I included five haiku in Digging for Water, the collection of poetry which I self-published in June of this year: my first experience of writing this poetic form. Recently, I entered two of these in a haiku writing competition where all of the entries were visible to everyone else. Being able to read the entries of the other contestants was fascinating, as was trying to analyse why some of them (in my opinion, of course) were more successful than others.

Haiku are a strange mix of sensuous physicality and abstract emptiness, and in this sense they remind me of a lot of Japanese and Chinese nature painting. What I mean by this is they paint a picture of a moment in time and objects within nature (leaves, birds, lakes) in a clear and sensual manner, but they do this in a subtly different way from how the Impressionists, for example, captured their moments in nature on their canvases. There is an emptiness at the heart of a haiku, but this is not emptiness as generally understood in the west: an absence of being or perhaps even an existential angst. It is more like a potentiality, a background which exists in order that things might unfold within it, a yin that enables the yang. It is as essential to what we read or see in the poem or painting as the physical objects and images which populate it.

There is research using eye trackers which shows that people from the East tend to spend more time scanning the background of a photograph than their western counterparts and consequently less time on the objects in the foreground. In a lot of western art, nature is something we observe from outside rather than something which surrounds us and to which we belong. Thus, in many representational paintings, the background is often a kind of theatre or stage in which the foregrounded events happen, a tendency that goes back at least as far as early Christian paintings in which the stories of the Bible were the important content and the natural background was often little more than an appropriate setting.

In contrast, I feel that the background has a much more active role in a lot of eastern nature painting. Human beings become part of nature, not detached observers of it. I recognise the danger of falling into a kind of orientalism here and drawing on stereotypes of the mysterious and inscrutable East, but I don’t think I’m imagining this pregnant emptiness in Japanese and Chinese nature paintings. Basically, it’s why I like them so much and feel that I never quite grasp their essence (although paradoxically I find great pleasure in this sense of a mystery that I can’t fully comprehend).

English versions of haiku, however, even if they conjure up attractive pictures of birds or blossom or snow, rarely manage to suggest this hint of the transcendental glimpsed through the prism of the material. When features from one culture are borrowed or appropriated from, or hybridised with, another culture (choose whichever verb you wish according to your attitude), there is always a lot of unconscious slippage. At a formal level, the 5-7-5 of a haiku is alien to the English language in a different way from, say, that of the alexandrine, but the outcome is generally the same: we struggle to achieve the effects we want when we use either of these forms and are almost bound to distort the original, just as Buddhism or Daoism were distorted when they became popular in the counterculture during the 1960s. In this essay, therefore, I am commenting only on haiku written in English: I have no knowledge of Japanese language or culture, and even if I did I doubt that it could outweigh my linguistic and cultural baggage.

I felt that one of the main problems with many of the haiku in the competition was a struggle with rhythm, a difficulty which I imagine was rooted in the unfamiliar structure of 5-7-5. The odd number of syllables in each line is probably harder to manipulate smoothly in English, with its strong bias towards iambs and therefore an even number of beats. Perhaps a greater use of anapests and dactyls would have helped build greater fluidity, for a lot of the lines had a sort of clunkiness that some poets display when they are trying to squeeze their work into rhyming or metrical patterns: too much focus on following the template and not enough on the overall flow of the words. So in the haiku submitted, short stretches of language that would have worked perfectly well in a piece of free verse or even a more traditional English metered structure sometimes landed like the thud of heavy boots, especially in the middle seven-syllable line.

Another problem was achieving the required simplicity and sense of ease. In a good haiku, there is no straining whatsoever for effect. (To be fair, this may well be true of all of the very best art and poetry － e.g. Blake － but that’s an idea for a different essay.) Perhaps the strain and lack of naturalness in some of the haiku also arose from their authors feeling a pressure to include things from nature which were also objects of obvious beauty: raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. But describing these kinds of things well requires a fineness of language which we seemed to find hard to achieve within the unfamiliar 5-7-5 structure.

One common weakness I found in many of the haiku in the competition (and I saw the same problem in my own haiku) was a tendency for each of the three lines to stay resolutely separate from each other, like three snapshots laid out sequentially which didn’t develop into any kind of progression or narrative but also failed to intertwine thematically into a satisfying coherent whole. The better examples managed to at least turn three strands into two in what I understand is a common feature of many traditional haiku, but creating a link between the two strands that was both subtle enough and yet somehow felt instinctively ‘right’ proved beyond most of us. Only the best of the haiku, in my opinion, avoided a sense of fragmentation.

Achieving this inner coherence is far from easy. It is not as simple as just running two of the three lines together or reducing the number of images in the poem. Nor is it solely a matter of staying on a fixed path and not making a detour because this detour seems to be an essential part of a haiku and without it the form becomes too literal and lacks that glancing indirectness which hints at the noumenal beyond the phenomenal surface reality. Online I have read people talk of the ‘satori’ moment in a haiku, a point at which it lights a flame within the mind: Bashō’s famous plop. To demand this of every haiku is surely too exacting since very few poems can be expected to help us reach zen enlightenment, but in my favourite examples from the competition there was always a point at which the world of nature and the world of the human mind met, generally in the third line: a moment when the two qualities I highlighted at the beginning of this essay － the sensuous and the abstract － came together and the poem became whole.

Returning to Bashō’s plop, several of us made deliberate efforts to incorporate such a moment into our haiku, often with an onomatopoeic word, to mark the moment when the angle of the poem shifts, but I feel that on the whole we failed. There was something just a little too calculated about how we did it. An external mark of this problem was our uncertain use of punctuation to incorporate the satori moment into the poem. A dash was the most popular solution, but in such a small poem a dash at the end of a line can feel forced and obtrusive, at least to me. More generally, punctuation is crucial in an English haiku: with so few syllables, the addition or the absence of a comma or a capital letter, or the choice of a dash rather than a colon, makes a vital difference. The sheer concision of a haiku is obviously a very strict discipline and we must learn how to use punctuation almost as a free extra syllable.

I felt we also caused ourselves problems by an overly literal interpretation of the requirement that a haiku should be placed within one of the four seasons. Thus, the words ‘winter’, ‘spring’, ‘summer’ and ‘autumn’ were commonplace, but this was often telling rather than showing (to use a phrase which is more often used of fiction than poetry). The successful entries didn’t do this: they approached the subject more elliptically, and this lack of directness seems to me the very essence of the haiku and Japanese art in general. There is something simultaneously both very literal and yet also numinous in eastern paintings whereas the West tends to separate these two qualities into opposing categories (realism or naturalism as the obverse of symbolism or expressionism or abstraction).

I am aware that this is all sounding rather negative. But we western would-be haiku writers were attempting something truly difficult and shouldn’t beat ourselves up for not reaching the heights we hoped for: flip it around and imagine asking a Japanese poet writing in Japanese to use iambic pentameter while also capturing the spirit of western verse. The result is almost bound to be something that is not an authentic variation on the original, but an uneasy and clumsy hybrid. Fusion food in my opinion often fails; I suspect the same is generally true of fusion poetry. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though: so much that is good in art comes when cultures borrow, clash and hybridise.

ART & AI

This week a picture came up on my Facebook feed which called itself a painting in the style of Edward Hopper. My immediate reaction was that it looked like Hopper but didn’t feel in the slightest like Hopper. The woman in the railway carriage was much too calm and composed; there was none of that unease and loneliness of a classic Hopper, nor any of its sense of inner emptiness. I suspect many other posters felt the same as me because several of them openly wondered if this was an AI-generated work.

There used to be a saying that ‘the camera doesn’t lie’. This wasn’t always true, of course, even in the days before photoshopping – careful cropping, for example, could create a variety of different realities, or at least interpretations, from the same photographic negative. But in general people believed a photo: it offered a technological version of ‘I saw it with my own eyes’, and it was therefore assumed to present the truth.

Few of us are so trusting now. We know that not only photographs, but even whole videos, can be concocted, and that if we see a film of Kamala Harris beating a cute puppy with a stick, we may well be looking at a fake. Unable any longer to believe our own eyes, we have come to rely on experts who declare whether a picture is real or has been tampered with, or if a video is fabricated. The problem with this is that we no longer have responsibility for what we see and what we therefore believe to be true; we need to pass that responsibility on to a third party. And then we are trapped in an infinite regress: how do we know that these experts are real and can be trusted? Who, or what, monitors the monitors?

In the world of art, this has updated and exacerbated the problems of detecting a forgery. At the moment, perhaps, like some of the people on my Facebook post, we may feel able to sense the difference between an AI-generated Hopper and the real thing. But as AI develops, who is to say that it will not be able to reproduce not merely the surface of a work of art, but also its essence? And while works by historical figures like Hopper may be relatively easy to verify or dismiss because we can demand very solid evidence to show that a newly discovered painting is genuinely his, living artists and writers are unlikely to be vetted so rigorously.

AI certainly complicates the issues of copyright and intellectual property. In a world where anyone can task AI with writing a poem or painting a picture, how can we be confident that a new work is created by a human being? It can be argued that AI is currently only churning out the kind of dross that poor genre writers have been doing for decades － boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl get back together and walk off into the sunset. I’m sure AI will be able to crank out cheesy romantic novels and scripts for action movies and good-versus-evil fantasies. But how will human artists earn a living in this world? And how do we prevent the further decline of art and literature into banality, cash-cow sequels created by dull middle-managers in marketing departments who have the aesthetic sensitivity of a friendly dictator and the creative spark of a concrete mixer?

In painting, at least, there is the requirement for a physical object to be created. But eventually AI will be attached to robot arms or a 3D printer, I’m sure, and even this role for the human being will be lost (although the physical nature of the art work would allow for more opportunities to check its veracity through processes such as material appraisal of the canvas). Literature, especially fiction, is under much greater immediate threat. On my Facebook feed, I regularly see adverts inviting people to ‘write’ and publish fiction by using AI (and I don’t mean using it as a guide or a source of inspiration, but literally giving AI a set of instructions, pushing a computer key, and out pops a novel). Why pay writers for the script of the latest dreary sequel if the sausages can be squeezed out just as efficiently by AI?

There has always been a delicate balance between reality and fantasy in Art. Part of our enjoyment of literature or theatre or film comes from entering a world which we know is make-believe. This becomes explicit at times: Calderón’s Life is a Dream, The Matrix, the twists and turns of Borges, the trompe d’oeil of Op Art, the work of Magritte, the impossibilities of Escher. But our pleasure always rests on a conviction that there is a real world to go back to, a real world we are taking a break from. Like the big dipper at the fair, we enjoy its otherness because we feel safe. We are not going to wake up to find ourselves transformed into a giant cockroach.

But this sense that AI is undermining the solid foundations of our lives is something that is affecting more than Art. There have always been individuals who questioned the reality of reality － Zhuangzi and his butterfly dreaming it was a man － but they have tended to be marginalised on the hermetic fringes of society. Their ideas had little traction with the vast majority of people who treated these ideas － if they thought about them at all － as conceits, the odd twitterings of mystics and madmen. But soon we may all be living in a world where the ground under our feet is unstable and we have very little confidence about what is real and what isn’t. Already so much of the world we inhabit is virtual (walk down the street and see the pedestrians with their noses pushed up against their mobile phones), and we often spend more than half of our waking lives staring into a screen and communicating with people we have never met in person. Slowly we are losing the security of feeling that there is a normal reality that we can return to when virtuality is over. It is never over. This radical uncertainty is our new reality.

I haven’t even expanded on the political threat of AI in a world in which life is increasingly mediated. Our leaders and politicians are now figures we see on TV or on the internet, and this is our only way of judging them. Again this makes us dependent on experts who can separate the wheat of the truthful from the chaff of the liars, but who pays these experts and who controls them? Will they really be disinterested? Will we be able to trust this media class to act as honest go-betweens? Or will he who pays the piper call the tune? I recognise that this gatekeeping role has always existed, but the gatekeepers were at least visible and, in theory at least, answerable to us. In a world of the huge online conglomerates that shape our daily lives, I am not confident that this is any longer true.

And what will this do to us psychologically? Eliot’s dictum that human beings cannot bear too much reality is a favourite quote among pessimists like me. But perhaps it is equally true that human beings cannot bear too much unreality. Will we descend into madness in a world where we can never be certain that anything is real? Are Deleuze and Guattari, for all their impenetrable language and pseudo-scientific pretensions, or earlier counter-cultural figures like Laing and Szasz, correct when they argue that we are already on our way to a schizoid world where we have lost all our moorings and only the madman is sane? Personally I find it increasingly difficult not to agree with them that our modern, mediated world is fundamentally sick.

Perhaps civilisation will not end in the bang of an asteroid hitting the earth or a thousand nuclear warheads, but in the whimper of a billion AI mutations which undermine and eventually shatter our sense of reality. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

CONTEMPORARY POETRY

There’s nothing I enjoy more than penning a diatribe about what I see as the failings of much of the contemporary poetry I come across online. But I’ll do my best not to rant. I’ll try to explain in a more measured way why I find it so difficult to warm to a lot of this work. My key problem is that I often feel marooned as I make my way through a poem. There seems nothing for me to hang on to. I often feel as if I’m reading a list or browsing through a catalogue.

I would distinguish here between two basic approaches to poetry. The first is looser, less strictly disciplined, and moves outwards. It’s expansive and open. The second folds in on itself like a flower. It’s concise and the structure is much tighter and clearly signalled through techniques such as rhyme and metre. Borrowing terms I have found online (although they seem far from common), I’ll call the first centrifugal and the second centripetal. From my google trawl, it seems the former has been used by scholars discussing biblical poetry while the latter has been used to describe the work of Yeats. In this essay, Whitman can serve as an example of the centrifugal and Frost of the centripetal.

Centrifugal poetry tends to eschew rhyme and consistent metre, and in terms of content it accumulates a succession of images as the poem progresses. Its most common structural device is anaphora at the beginning of lines. Centripetal poetry often uses rhyme and metre as an anchor and is generally based around one or two key metaphors or symbols which are woven into the poem throughout the verse.

Thus, in I Hear America Singing, Whitman begins each line with a person － mechanic, carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker, wood-cutter, mother － and strengthens this by repetition of the word ‘singing’, plus other repeated phrases such as ‘as he + verb’ and ‘or + prepositional phrase’. If at times I have in other essays unfairly accused contemporary poets of creating a ‘catalog’, this word (and also ‘list’) have been used by analysts of Whitman’s work. But his listing in the poem discussed here has an internal logic. It isn’t just a random collection of disparate images.

In The Road Not Taken, in contrast, Frost uses a consistent ABAAB rhyming pattern in each of the four stanzas. The metre is complex and not restricted to iambs, but there is an underlying regularity largely missing from the Whitman. Thematically, the poem is exceedingly tight, hardly straying from the central symbol of a fork in a road as a metaphor for a major choice in someone’s life. In that sense, and only in that sense, it is very simple.

I am not arguing that the Frost is better than the Whitman － which of the poems you prefer, if either, is clearly a matter of personal choice. My taste is for the former, but I accept that the Whitman has a clear structure and is not merely prose masquerading as poetry. My gripe is that I often read attacks on poets who do Frost badly － whose rhymes clunk, whose rhythm becomes tedious and predictable, and who twist grammar unnaturally in order to fit the metre － but I almost never read any criticism of people who do Whitman badly. And there are lots of them.

My argument is that bad Whitman is just as frequent and damaging as bad Frost, all the more so since few poets seem to write in anything but free verse nowadays, but this poor quality is almost never called out. For example, instead of Whitman’s variations on a theme (people in their different social roles) in I Hear America Singing, many contemporary poems pile up random images one after another with no obvious connection to link them thematically. It is like a sales catalogue where different items for sale － a pair of shoes, a filing cabinet, a tin of soup, a mattress － are placed randomly together on the same page.

Another common problem is verbosity: a lot of contemporary poets don’t know when it’s time to end the poem (I’d personally argue that Whitman was also guilty of this at times). So the verses multiply, and the images pile up, but the poem as a whole goes nowhere: it is an accumulation rather than a coherent statement. The same ideas could be expressed in a fraction of the number of lines.

It is unfair, though, when people who call themselves traditionalists accuse Whitman of destroying what they consider to be traditional poetry. The roots of poetry in the west are oral and based on narrative, so Whitman’s verse is closer in many ways to these origins. It’s also worth stressing that Whitman was deliberately and consciously borrowing from the use of language in the Bible, a language which underpins much of English-speaking poetry. In many ways, it is the careful verse of Frost or Yeats which is a movement away from the roots of western poetry, even if the written tradition they write within also began a long time ago. The kind of tight-knit poem that Frost or Yeats wrote could not have existed before mass printing other than for a privileged elite because the nuances of language that only register when we get the chance to read a poem again and again aren’t possible in an oral tradition. We hear it and move on, swayed by the delivery of the speaker as much as by the poet’s exact choice of words.

If the roots of poetry indeed lie in narrative, this may be one of the reasons why contemporary free verse poems are so often based on a personal vignette or a journey, using narrative as a structural device in the absence of technical features such as rhyme. Obviously these narratives are much shorter and tend to have more internal psychological content than the epics of the classical period or the sagas, but a story or a journey of some sort is used to provide the structural framework that the poem would otherwise lack. In the absence of rhyme and metre, the story takes us by the hand and guides us through the poem, at least if it is written well.

Spoken aloud － and let’s not forget that Whitman believed that poetry should be spoken aloud rather than read on the page － Whitman’s style of poetry can be enormously powerful, and perhaps in an age where film and the internet have made video more central to our daily lives than the written word, it is not surprising that variations on his style remain so popular in the contemporary scene. In America, certainly, his free-ranging model has largely become the norm.

I just wish the same high standards were demanded of centrifugal poems that are demanded of centripetal ones. There is room for both in the world.

THE NEW POETIC TRADITION

Researching possible markets for our style of poem is an essential part of being a contemporary poet, and nowadays includes online poetry magazines, so I recently looked at the kind of work which is being published in them. Although I wasn’t expecting a lot of ABAB, I was shocked to find so few poems using 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.

POP MUSIC

When I was studying at Warwick University in the late 1970s/early 80s, I lived in a hippie-trippie household in Coventry in the days when hippies were becoming something of a joke. We were all into music that was still marginally trendy even if punk was gobbing on our incense sticks: I was a big fan of Beefheart, Brett was into Syd Barrett’s solo work, while Jon, who looked very much the stereotypical hippie, naturally went for Jefferson Airplane.

A couple occupied the room above mine: Di and Charlie (no, not that Di and Charlie, although everyone’s favourite royal misfits did get hitched towards the end of my time there. My friends organised a not-the-royal-wedding picnic by a river － in Ludlow if I remember correctly － and we all had lots of fun tossing a Di and Charlie frisbee around).

The Di and Charlie chez moi were strange in a completely different way from the royal couple. Neither of them were students any longer, having dropped out of Warwick, although she was learning Serbo-Croat in her spare time for some reason I can’t remember or never discovered, while Charlie worked in catering at the university when he wasn’t drunk. Anyway, the strangest thing by far about Di was that her favourite band was the Seekers. Yes, that group from Australia who did stuff like I’ll Never Find Another You. I couldn’t help but admire Di for this: preferring a cheesy, folksy Australian band when she was surrounded by a peer group still cocooned in 60s weirdness and flower power.

But in retrospect Di had a point. When I hear the Seekers now, I realise how good they were in their way, even if a lot of their stuff was twee. First, Judith Durham had an amazing voice. Next, their harmonies were up there with the Hollies or the ultimate harmonisers, the Beach Boys. And forget the cheesy, folksy stuff. Did anything encapsulate Swinging London like the whistling in Georgy Girl? Does anything else set off visions of bouffants and mini-skirts and Carnaby Street in quite the same way?

But my personal favourite among their songs is The Carnival Is Over. I know, I can hear the groans. Yes, it’s sentimental and obvious and predictable, but every time I hear it, it still tugs on my heartstrings and my eyes get tearful. If ever a song proved Coward right when he wrote in Private Lives, ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’, it’s this one.

Except it isn’t cheap in many ways. That’s what makes Pop into Pop – the direct arrow to the heart. And Pop often fails when it tries to go beyond this. Personally I really like Days of Pearly Spencer and The Windmills of your Mind, but neither were smash hits, even with all the publicity Radio Caroline gave to the former. They weren’t big hits because they didn’t go directly to the heart: they detoured through the brain. They’ve both been covered since, of course, and got some of the acclaim which I feel they deserve, but neither offers the instant gratification of classic Pop.

What got me thinking about all this was a YouTube I watched by Samuel Andreyev. He is a composer and musician whose channel I first found because of an analysis he did of Frownland by Captain Beefheart and then his interviews with members of the Magic Band, but he is classically trained and ranges across many different musical genres (and I’d highly recommend his channel to anyone interested in music).

Anyway, this particular post was titled 20 Songs You Need to Hear. And I wondered which twenty songs I would have included, but then I realised it would just be a list of my favourite twenty songs. Then I thought about Andreyev’s list and his felt much the same. It seemed to have no organising principle with regard to genre and arguably didn’t have much pop music at all, for many of the chosen pieces (by Soft Machine, Beefheart, the Velvets, Leonard Cohen etc) weren’t really Pop.

Now it’s his channel and he can do what the hell he wants with it, of course, and I won’t argue with many of his choices because lots of the musicians he chose are my favourites, too. And I especially admired him for choosing Cohen and then selecting Everybody Knows. I say that because Andreyev is a musician and I get the feeling that he inhabits an aural world in a way that I, as a writer, inhabit a verbal world. Yet he could appreciate a musician whose greatest gift is as a lyricist (he also recognised this quality in Cole Porter). And the song he chose was perfect as an example of everything that is great about Cohen as a lyricist – his mix of irony, cynicism, a barely submerged idealism, and more than a splash of Romance with a capital R. (Since writing the paragraph above, I have found out that Andreyev has also published several books of poetry, which I guess debunks a lot of what I say here.)

Anyway, as always I digress. This got me thinking about Pop as a genre and I felt none of Andreyev’s selections were pure examples of the form. Yes, some of them had made the charts, but they were all slightly off-centre compared to an imagined archetypal pop song. If I were choosing twenty great pop songs I would definitely have included something by Spector and perhaps another girl band such as the Chiffons, The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore, different Beach Boys from the one Andreyev chose (God Only Knows, perhaps, or Wouldn’t It Be Nice), a Burt Bacharach number or two, (Walk On By by Dionne Warwick and The Look of Love by Dusty), and perhaps some soul (Sam Cooke? Wilson Pickett?) or even Motown.

So why do I feel that these songs are in some way the purest expression of Pop? Well, Pop, as I said, is direct. It was originally made to be played on the radio, so it had to grab your attention and it had to do it quickly. In general it couldn’t afford too much subtlety. It especially needed an opening that smacked you between the eyes, such as that of Reach Out, I’ll Be There. The Stones in particular were very good at this (I’m not a big fan of the song as a whole, but the opening to Gimme Shelter is stunning). Pop also tends to be emotional. Love and its trials and tribulations is by far the most common emotion, of course, and the feelings expressed tend to be personal. When Pop gets political, it generally fails. Rock and punk, with their harder edge, are much better suited to it.

Another essential of Pop is that it is manufactured, created in a studio by professionals aiming to make the perfect three-minute product. Whereas jazz is usually far better live, a lot of Pop loses its magic in performance, which is why I suppose there was so much lip-synching on Top of the Pops. Unlike a lot of modern jazz, Pop tends to be short, again a result of its history of needing airtime on radio. When it gets to stuff like Hey Jude, which in my personal opinion wastes a good song by tagging on a long ending that sounds more like a football chant, it has lost its way. For me, Ticket to Ride and Paperback Writer are vastly superior.

Because at heart Pop is commercial – it exists in order to make money. In Pop, though, this often becomes a virtue – it prevents the kind of self-indulgence that happened in the late 60s/70s when the simplicity of Fats Domino or Little Richard had become the tedium and faux-profundity of rock operas. Pop is honest in this regard. There is none of the pretence that often exists in other art-forms, especially the world of art, that this is art for art’s sake rather than for filthy shekels. Many of the musicians who created the wonderful Pop of the 60s, of course, almost certainly did it purely for the joy they found in creating it, but not the moneymen who mattered (although I have to concede that things were much less corporate in those days and there were lots of entrepreneurs at that time who did put their money where their mouth was, especially in black music).

For all its lack of pretension, though, Pop can be strangely promiscuous and will borrow from anywhere: the various love songs that rely heavily on The Moonlight Sonata, for instance, or the moments of jazziness at the end of Dead End Street, or Malcolm McClaren raiding opera, or the baroque excesses of Bohemian Rhapsody or Wuthering Heights. But, and this for me is important, every time it does this, it risks moving away from the essentials of its genre and getting lost, even if that particular borrowing is successful, and eventually needs to be dragged back to a singer, a lead guitar, a bass, a set of drums, and probably a piano, all in a recording studio.

Before I finish, let me quickly say that I understand that I am creating arbitrary categories when I suggest this clear divide between Pop, Rock, Soul, and so on, especially in the artistic fervour that was popular music in the 1960s. Andreyev has a Kinks song in his list, for example, but where would one place them? They were clearly Pop in the sense that they had a string of singles that were big hits, but they also went off in their own idiosyncratic direction as the decade wore on. And how about bands like the Stones? Are they Pop or Rock? Clearly these categories are fictions on one level. I can only say in my defence that I have been trying to isolate what I see as pure Pop, even if I know this Platonic form doesn’t exist in reality and every song to some extent is a mix of genres.

I’d also like to make clear that I’m not claiming that Pop is mindless froth and is incapable of dealing with ‘serious’ issues. Popular music has always spoken for the poor and the oppressed, for example in forms such as folk and reggae. However, modern commercial Pop takes place in a more compromised situation because of its focus on making a profit. Not even this, though, prevents social or political comment, even in songs which many people would claim are mindless froth: for example, the girl in the Shirelles song wondering if he will still love her tomorrow (the subtext being after sex has happened), or one of the Moonlight Sonata songs, Past, Present and Future by the Shangri-las, with its hints of sexual pressure, abuse or even rape (‘but don’t try to touch me, don’t try to touch me, cos that will never happen again’).

I have no idea what happened to Di and Charlie from my hippie house, not even whether either or both of them are still alive. But if Di is, I really hope that from time to time she gets out her black vinyl version of her Seekers Greatest Hits album, puts it on her turntable, and whistles along to Georgy Girl. Because another thing that Pop is very good at is capturing the spirit of an age and reminding us all of how daily life used to be.

WRITING FLASH FICTION

I recently rediscovered flash fiction. I first came across it when I was living and working in Singapore in 2016, had a go at writing a few pieces, but assumed they had got lost in my move to Portugal a few months later. Several weeks ago, however, I found them on a USB. So I dusted them off, rewrote them a little, and am now trying to sell them to various magazines.

There seems to be little agreement about what exactly constitutes flash fiction, other than it’s shorter than standard fiction, and a host of names have emerged to differentiate various word-limits: micro, flash, short shorts, and so on. From my trawl of Google, it seems that below 1500 words is often chosen as the point at which a short short becomes a piece of flash. I would personally go stricter than this and place the cut-off at 1000 words at most. My stories from Singapore were around 300 words, except for one which clocked in at slightly double that.

Over the last year I have also written several stories for a short-story writing competition I enter quarterly, which often has a limit of around 900 words, but I’ve tended not to think of these as flash fiction because they still contain elements of plotting and characterisation similar to those you might find in a standard short story. Overall, I feel that as the count goes below 500 words, the things I talk about in this essay grow more essential and a different genre of literature begins to emerge, whereas, in my opinion, the ‘normal’ rules of fiction start to kick in at around 1000 words. So the space between 500 and 1000 is a bit of a grey area.

During my Google search, I came across many websites arguing that two essentials of flash fiction were a pared-down plot and a restricted list of characters. Certainly the traditional whodunit seems out of the question, but must flash always be so skeletal? In flash fiction, it is true, everything must be established almost immediately － setting, mood, characters, storyline － with little opportunity for subtleties and extra layers to be added later. I will briefly look at these four elements in turn in the rest of this essay. I have to say, though, that I am not at all confident that what I write here will be universally relevant to the writing of flash fiction or whether it will merely reflect my own individual practice.

With regard to setting, there is clearly no time in flash fiction for Hardy’s leisurely descriptions of nature or the meticulous detailing of furniture and rooms that Chandler delighted in. In flash fiction the simplest of statements usually has to suffice to establish all that it is necessary for readers to know: the action takes place in a hospital ward or a school playground or a street. This detail tends to come very early, often in the first line, so that readers can immediately feel secure within the setting and place themselves mentally in that space. I can imagine a flash fiction which consists of nothing but dialogue for the first half of the story － something similar to Hemingway’s The Killers (although even there the first line tells us we are in ‘Henry’s lunchroom’) － but I suspect a story that happens nowhere in particular － Waiting for Godot: (‘A country road. A tree.’) － will rarely work well in flash. So the setting will often be somewhere commonplace with which the readers are familiar so that they can fill in the details for themselves. Keep it simple seems the obvious advice for writers of flash fiction as far as setting is concerned.

Mood must also be quickly established, by a combination of factual information about the setting with a choice of words that sets the mood, often by means of a single adjective － trees become ‘skeletal’ or ‘lush’, rooms ‘bare’ or ‘crowded’, beaches ‘remote’ or ‘hectic’, and so on － thereby killing two birds, setting and mood, with one stone. As I argue later in more detail, I feel there are many similarities between writing poetry and writing flash fiction, and this spare use of descriptive adjectives is an essential tool to set the mood when there is a severe limit on word count.

The introduction of several characters in depth is almost impossible in flash; there is simply not enough space to do this without confusing the reader and risking the focus and intensity of the writing. So there will often be only one main character, and he or she will be introduced very early in the story, usually in the first line, with the author making clear that this is going to be their story. (If first-person narrative is used, other snippets of information about the character may be slipped into this first sentence that immediately begin to fill out the first-person speaking.) If there are two main characters, and the story is essentially a dialogue between equals, both will be mentioned early, and some background information will generally be supplied about their relationship (whether they have just met, are old friends or lovers, boss and employee, and so on).

The literary equivalent of movie extras, walk-on characters, is possible, but they tend to be anonymous and tangential to the main action. They will rarely be given names (because this sends a message to the reader that they are important as individuals in some way, while they are not) and are usually reduced to a function (e.g. ‘the waiter’). Stereotyping will come into play here: for example, the waiter may be quickly shown to be French and supercilious, since English speakers believe we know that all French waiters are supercilious. This adds some colour to the picture without risking sending the work off on a tangent or in a different direction altogether. Flash is therefore well suited to satire and parody and irony since even more than most fiction it relies on a reader’s preconceptions about people, which can then be used for a quick injection of detail or humour. It is much less well suited to subtle portrayal of fully rounded individuals in social groups and situations (e.g. real French waiters).

Obviously there is not much room for complex plotting in flash fiction but this does not necessarily mean that plot is absent or even necessarily hugely truncated. All the same, the writer will need to find ways of including the plot in the most economical way. A plot takes time to unfold in a story if it follows a traditional, chronological ABC, but this amount of time can be reduced if it is introduced by means of the main character remembering the past or reflecting on the situation in which they find themselves, and in the process identifying and focusing on the most important past facts and moments for the reader’s benefit. This is similar to the use of flashback in film: an interesting switching between time frames that not only tells the story in a swift and concentrated fashion but can also pique the interest of readers through variety and a more imaginative unfolding of the plot.

On my trawl through Google, I found people who felt that a good flash story should finish with a sudden, surprising twist, but in my opinion this kind of ace up the sleeve can easily be overplayed. First, creating a genuinely surprising ending that also somehow seems inevitable once it happens requires immense skill on the part of a writer, who must insert tiny clues throughout the story, sometimes even in as little as single words, which the reader brushes past and doesn’t even notice on first reading, but then feels rather dim not to have spotted. Second, it does not take long for brilliant endings to become clichés. For example, the murder mystery in which one of the murdered characters turns out not to be dead (perhaps first used in And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie?) was a coup de grace, but readers get cute very quickly and this kind of coup rapidly becomes just another cliché and a yawn. Third, if readers expect a surprising ending and then one doesn’t arrive, they may feel cheated or disappointed. Yet the actual simple ending may be the best way by far to round off a perfect little tale.

I have personally found that a radical change in mid-story can work well, where the reader has been led to believe that a certain situation exists but suddenly the reality turns out to be different. Readers then need to quickly readjust their thinking mid-stream, which puts pressure on them but can also create a feeling of novelty and pleasing surprise. In my opinion, this may come across as less contrived than the sudden, dramatic final twist, while also keeping readers on their toes. Another useful possibility is to imply, but not directly state, certain aspects of the story (sexual abuse is a classic example), so that readers need to keep these possibilities in mind but never feel confident that they are not making a leap they shouldn’t make. Keep it simple gives way here to keep them guessing.

A common pattern I have noticed in my own flash stories, although I am unsure whether this is merely the way I write or something that may be a more general feature of the genre, is a slow ratcheting up of tension as the main character’s fears slowly grow or the situation gradually worsens. This avoids sudden lurches of plot which may be hard to pull off in such a restricted number of words, and is a way to keep the focus on the main character and the overall situation, while preventing a feeling of stasis, thereby retaining and building tension towards the story’s climax.

One thing that intrigues me and appeals to me about flash fiction, especially once it slips below the 500-word mark, is that it seems to operate in a space somewhere between fiction and poetry in the sense that every single word must pull its weight, and so concision is essential in both forms. (Although I’m not sure that some contemporary poets regard concision as a desirable quality in poetry any longer, since they often seem happy to write as if they were journalists getting paid by the word.) Those adjectives and adverbs we all use and frequently overuse as writers must be ruthlessly expunged from flash fiction unless there is an absolute conviction that they add something significant to the cooking pot.

Another feature of poetry －the ability to say two things (or even more) at the same time in the same stretch of language － is also a highly desirable quality in flash. Thus flash writing is often rather elliptical and I am personally of the opinion that symbols play a more central role in flash than in other forms of fiction. Realistic fiction, which slowly builds up a replica of everyday life, a mirror of nature, takes time to develop its effects, time which is not available to the writer of flash. It is often the very ordinariness of language and scene, the mundanity of the everyday life portrayed, that slowly draws the reader into a story written in a realistic genre. Central symbols can have their role in realism － Ibsen’s wild duck or Chekhov’s cherry orchard － but these act almost subliminally, subordinated to the mimesis of social life. In fiction of normal length, the characters take over the story and have a life of their own, and there is less space, or need, for symbols. Sometimes, in many ways, the characters become symbols themselves. In the restricted space of 500 words, on the other hand, it is harder for characters to dominate, whereas a central symbol can easily perform the role of being the very heart of the writing, its essential meaning, as is true in poetry.

This makes me wonder if flash could be a good home for surrealism. I am not talking about fantasy here, because although fantasy clearly isn’t ‘real’, it tends to be heavy on plot (good versus evil, and so on). I am talking rather of disparate items that have no obvious connection to each other but somehow feel correct when placed together, as in much surrealistic painting and writing. (Note to myself: I must give this one a try.) So while modern fantasy stories à la Harry Potter might not thrive under the conditions of flash, one obvious area where flash fiction can succeed, and has clearly succeeded in the past, is that of fairy tales and fables, such as those collected by Grimm or written by Aesop, which are often very short in terms of word count.

Finally, let me turn to the role of the reader in flash fiction. It seems to me that he or she has a far more active role which requires a lot of work and a sensitivity to language in a genre where this is paramount and where the tiniest of hints, cloaked in veils of language, can move the story on, doing the work that entire paragraphs might be called upon to do in longer realistic fiction. Whereas readers can miss out whole passages or even chapters in longer fiction and still be fully aware of what is going on, they need to be much more attentive when reading flash. They are often required to paste the story together for themselves using subtle clues half-hidden in the writing. For me, a good flash fiction will offer up a lot on the second reading that isn’t noticed on the first.

So although I am prone to ranting about modern life with its pointless speed and its short attention spans and its superficiality of clicking ‘Like’ on social media, I can see a huge potential in flash fiction. I can’t see the point once we hit the extremes －micro-stories of one paragraph or even a handful of words － but I can see a role for 300-1000 words as a crystallisation of literary expression, similar in many ways to the haiku in poetry. I am on course to become a big fan of flash fiction, I suspect, both as a writer and as a reader.

POSTMODERNISM & POETRY: A RESPONSE

This essay is a response to an essay on postmodernism and poetry written by Adam Sedia that I read on a website, The Society of Classical Poets, which publishes poems with rhyme and metre and has just featured one of mine. His core argument is that postmodernism is an ‘abyss of nihilism’ and with specific regard to poetry, a destructive influence adding to a common feeling that poetry has become ‘superfluous’. He uses examples of works by poets to support his argument.

If you wish to read his essay, you can do so on https://classicalpoets.org/2024/08/07/postmodernism-and-poetry-final-disintegration-and-hope-for-renewal-by-adam-sedia/

For me, the essential questions regarding the group of ideas that arose in the second half of the 20^th century under the broad label of ‘postmodernism’ are less philosophical than practical: Where do these ideas take us and what can we do with them? The philosophical case for postmodernism is reasonably strong, at least if it means a radical questioning of what it is possible to know and a scepticism about the certainty of knowing something called Truth. Is this Truth everywhere? Is it universal? And where is the God-point from where we can confidently discern what it is? Philosophy often uses the via negativa, and in this case does a reasonable job in my opinion of exposing the problems of a naive belief in a simple reality ‘out there’.

Raising these doubts about ‘transcendental signifiers’ is nothing like as groundbreaking as some postmodernists wish to claim, though: radical epistemological scepticism has existed almost from the very start of western philosophy in groups such as the Sophists and the Sceptics. Meanwhile, in the east, Hinduism had its concept of maya, Buddhists spoke of the self as a fiction, and Daoism’s key text opens with, ‘The way that can be spoken of is not the true way’. And despite the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, there remain many mystical traditions in the west grounded in similar ideas.

The problem for purveyors of these ideas is that they house a built-in logical contradiction: a statement that there is no such thing as truth must of necessity also not be true. Some opponents of postmodernism think they are clever to point this out, but I cannot believe that the key names in postmodernist philosophy are going to be blindsided by this paradox and have never heard of the Cretan liar. However, I do basically agree with Sedia that an extreme relativism which rejects even the possibility of Truth represents a dead-end in important ways, and not only in poetry.

With nothing meaningful to say, the voice either chatters or falls silent. As Beckett says in The Unnamable, ‘Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak.’ (As Beckett is a high priest of Modernism, it is hard to imagine a quote which better questions the fissure that many assume to exist between Modernism and Postmodernism.) However, the option of silence will not result in a list of journal publications on your CV. So, in contemporary academia, we have a class of academics in the arts and humanities who, having embraced postmodernism, are busy chattering away.

Scientists operate in a world where they know that Truth exists and it is out there: it is their job to find it. We can question this epistemological certainty all we like, but it gives science a sense of purpose that has been incredibly enabling. Lacking the same certainty, and often doubting almost everything they think, intellectuals in the arts and also many artists have turned in on themselves. As Sedia points out, there is no longer a belief that they can say anything significant or make any contribution beyond irony, reworkings of the past, and wordplay.

The worst effect this has had regarding poetry is to cordon it off from ‘ordinary people’, turning it into an enclave for academics and a self-appointed intelligentsia. In daily life, people still go to the movies and listen to music. Even in the visual arts, where a similar postmodernist trend to that in poetry has been strong, people still go to galleries. Ironically, in view of how shocking they were seen to be at the time, the Impressionists pack them in. But poetry has become this sad grey room with no windows and no exit where a few people write poetry to be read only by each other and then congratulate one another on their cleverness.

‘My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky.’ Anyone can read these lines and immediately respond to them. You don’t need to have read Heidegger or Derrida. You don’t need to be au fait with Paradise Lost or the works of Matthew Arnold. You just need to know what a rainbow is and what it feels like to look at one. In contrast, the overwhelming feeling that I get from reading the poems included in Sedia’s essay (which he chooses very well as support for his argument) is one of sterility (the one by Ashbery is especially dry, with barely a word which is not abstract – it is an academic paper masquerading as a poem). Yes, some of the poems are smart (some might say smartass), and often quite funny, but they don’t really communicate with the general reader or even seem to care whether they do. Sedia argues, and I agree with him, that these works are aridly self-referential, looking inwards at their own wittiness, and signifying if not exactly nothing, then very little: poetry about the impossibility of poetry.

I’m not saying there is no place for poetry which questions itself, or discusses what a word, a phrase or a sentence is, or asks whether it is possible for an artist to be genuinely original, but there are better ways to do this than showing off your erudition to an elite in-group. People are not stupid; they can engage in complex ideas as long as you treat them with respect and make a real attempt to communicate with them. Using anagrams of the words in Shakespeare’s sonnets to create a new, rather scatological poem (as one of Sedia’s poets does) is definitely not the best way forward if the poet genuinely wants to engage with a broad audience about the things that really matter to them.

The logical end of a radical mistrust of what human beings are able to know and a relativism that declares itself incapable of making any confident statement about reality is often the silence of the hermit or the religious mystic. But this option is blocked off from academics since they have to publish in order to get promotion or even basic tenure. They can’t go and live in a cave or gaze at their navels on a beach in Goa. Instead they produce papers about whether meaning must always be deferred and write poetry which makes no attempt to talk to the vast majority of people about the things they care about most.

Although I broadly agree with Sedia, I have two minor disagreements with him to outline before I sum up my response. The first concerns his statement that the ‘primary task’ of the Frankfurt School was to ‘deconstruct the mystique of the works of the past, trivializing them, overlooking the messages that made them into enduring works, and rendering them instead objects of ridicule viewed from the vantage of a supposedly more enlightened present day’. I would argue instead that they saw their primary task – one in which they largely failed – as an attempt to try to rescue vulgar Marxism from its insistence that all cultural features were an epiphenomenal superstructure based on materialist roots: in other words, to find a place for Art (and other non-economic factors) in Marxist theory. If they were critical of the works of the past, it was from the point of view of the class struggle, and not an attempt to deconstruct and mock those works, an activity which I feel fairly sure they would have seen as a bourgeois indulgence.

I can only touch very briefly on my second disagreement with Sedia, and that concerns placing Foucault within postmodernism. It is a position Foucault himself did not accept and I think his arguments about power are much more complex than the wicked oppressor/helpless victim meme to which it is often reduced (a lot of the blame for thinking like this must rest with Jordan Peterson and his talk of ‘Marxist postmodernism’, a facile label which fails to recognise that there is a huge area of conflict between the two groups: most postmodernists dislike Marxism as a grand narrative and most Marxists dislike postmodernism as a bourgeois distraction from the class struggle.) It is true that there are historical links, especially in France, between many of the key thinkers of both movements since they share a common history, but fusing their similarities and differences into a broad ‘Marxist postmodernism’ where gender, race and sexuality have replaced social class as the determining criteria does no justice to the subtlety of Foucault’s ideas.

In conclusion, I broadly agree with Sedia regarding the influence of postmodernist ideas in poetry: its effects have been detrimental and made poetry increasingly ‘superfluous’. However, I would reverse the importance of the two key factors that Sedia identifies, and see the way in which poetry and ‘serious’ literature have become dominated by academia as a more important factor than postmodern theory. Individuals study creative writing in faculties devoted to it and then go on to teach in those faculties and publish the kinds of poem and fiction that is rewarded there. This has the unfortunate effect of creating a literary world where everyone talks about being daring and different and groundbreaking, but in reality the work becomes increasingly homogenous at the level of both form (for example, an almost total rejection of rhyme and metre) and content (a focus on tales of oppressed self-identity or the abstruse jokes and ironies of the type of poem that Sedia rightly criticises). As a result, the gap between poetry and the general public widens and deepens. To my mind, this is the key reason for the problems that Sedia outlines, problems which must be overcome if we want a poetry and literature which is both accessible and genuinely fresh.

ART: SUCCESS & FAILURE

I’m seventy now, so I think I can safely call myself a failed writer. Writing is almost the only thing to which I’ve ever felt truly committed, but I’ve had little success at it. As a young man I wrote poems and collected an impressive heap of rejection slips (from memory, I believe the grand total of three of my poems were published). Then I became interested in theatre and turned my hand to drama. Three of my plays were performed on the fringe of the Fringe. Fun, but hardly life-changing. In my 40s, I switched to novels. The first was published by a traditional publisher, earned some good reviews, and even got translated into French. Close, but no cigar. Then the publisher ceased to trade, so I self-published two more novels (and re-published my original one, making that magic number three yet again), but self-publishing is a hard slog, especially if you are someone who is not adept at the hail-fellow-well-met charm offensive of a natural self-publicist. Also, let’s be honest, the shadow of vanity publishing still lingers over self-publishing even in an age when it has become less shameful. If you pay for it to be published, it’s hardly surprising that any reader or critic is going to approach it with low expectations if they bother to pick it up at all. So here I am at the age of seventy, having turned full circle and gone back to writing poetry, self-publishing a collection of poems which I wrote in 2023 and 2024. I can hardly lay claim to a glittering writing career.

Obviously, I would prefer to have been a success – who wouldn’t? But I have come to realise that failure has its compensations while success is not without its pitfalls. This essay will look at Kipling’s ‘two impostors’ and how they impact on the artist both as an artist and as a human being.

The biggest positive of failure is the freedom it allows to fail again, fail better. Artists who are successful and build up a loyal fanbase must find it hard to remain in control of their art and not become at the very least influenced by their admirers and their fame. Every new book or album might become the moment when they fall off the pedestal, while a radical change of artistic direction risks losing a lot of their followers, who accuse them of ‘selling out’ – think of Dylan going electric or Bowie killing off Ziggy. We failures have a much easier time maintaining our integrity. I say this not because I believe we are in any way morally superior or we fail as a result of our higher level of honesty and commitment to our art – as Orton said, ‘there is no intrinsic merit in a flop’ – but simply because we are in a position where it is easier to stick to our principles. Writing a poem or recording a song is not like writing a diary meant solely for private consumption; there is always an audience in the mind, and when the artist knows that audience and why they are popular with that audience, it must take a strong sense of self-confidence and inner conviction to risk all that and branch out in a new direction.

At worst, a situation can develop where artists grow to resent the very thing that brought them success: the band who are doomed to play their biggest hit for the rest of their lives even though it was written forty years ago and they think their current work is more interesting; figurative artists who are panned by the critics when they turn their hands to abstraction or vice versa; actors like Anthony Perkins who find themselves trapped in a role which they performed so perfectly that they are expected to repeat it again and again until they die. Some famous writers even go so far as publishing under a pseudonym in order to escape the creation which has taken over their lives (Rowling and Christie), but they then find that they are suddenly subject to the same obscurity as the vast majority of writers, or, if their identity becomes publicly known, their fans refuse to accept this new incarnation of their art. And in general, I imagine, the bigger the success, the tighter the handcuffs.

Some artists negotiate this game of chess much better than others: Picasso or Miles Davis or Bowie himself, for example, were adroit at moving on and taking their admirers along for the ride. But less restless artists easily become pigeonholed and can eventually find themselves reduced to a stereotype. It might be argued that a ‘great’ artist will rise above this restrictive public image much more easily, but I’m not convinced of this and I don’t think the pigeonholing is limited to ‘lesser’ writers working in popular genres such as fantasy or crime. We failures have none of these concerns: we can go on producing what we want as long as we are willing to countenance continued failure. Yes, when we are young we may try out various genres or styles in an attempt to achieve success, or perhaps to find out where our talent lies, but as we age and we fail to break through, we become resigned to our obscurity and either give up altogether or become Sunday artists working to our own timetable and following our own desires. Unlike the million-selling superstar, we can afford to take risks and do as we please because we have no reputation (or career) to lose.

And yet this obscurity can also be a serious problem. No matter how strong their will and self-belief, no matter how committed they are to their art, artists who have no public recognition must at some point lose heart and fail to grow, like a sapling that gets no sunlight and eventually withers, and this is before we consider the need to make enough money to survive. Most of us have egos and need them stroking from time to time in order to remain upbeat. Artists like Cezanne, quietly refining his art and eventually revolutionising painting while receiving little encouragement and public acclaim, are utterly admirable but rare, and even Cezanne with all his talent was haunted by self-doubt. And finally, and very importantly, Cezanne had a small fortune to give him the freedom to follow the path that he did.

Of course, almost none of the painters and writers stubbornly continuing to churn out their work despite being mired in obscurity will have a fraction of Cezanne’s talent. But even Sunday artists know the sheer joy of creation and this pleasure should never be underestimated. The creative urge is a blessing, even if what is produced isn’t going to change the world, and I personally cannot imagine a life without this compulsion to imagine and create. I can’t help but wonder if some of this joy disappears when the work becomes a mere job and something we love turns into a chore: when the writer has a contract with a publisher and knows they must deliver a manuscript within a deadline, and in all likelihood is expected to repeat their earlier success. When my first novel, a political thriller, garnered those good reviews, I could easily have repeated the formula: I’d found a genre I could get at least a degree of success in, so it made sense to continue to work in it. Instead I chose to write a very different kind of novel which my publisher didn’t like and turned down (fairly so, I might add). From the point of view of a career, this was frankly a stupid choice on my part, but I didn’t want to end up merely repeating myself like I would if I worked in an office. Success, even a limited one, can become a cage, and sometimes obscurity has its quiet consolations.

I doubt whether even the most famous of artists ever feel secure deep down because they know that the ‘two impostors’ are fickle and should therefore be treated the same, and that, however elevated their reputation becomes, they can never have full confidence that this will remain as high as tastes and fashions change. Even the unquestionably ‘great’, people at the level of Shakespeare or Rembrandt, have had reputations which fluctuated over the centuries. In this respect, artists are very different from athletes and sportspeople, who have a short career and must painfully adapt at an early age to handing over their crown to a younger pretender, but at the end of that career they can feel confident of their position in the history of their sport. No one can ever take away those gold medals and tournament trophies: those victories were clear-cut and earned and deserved. In the arts, merit is not always rewarded so fairly: take a glance at all the movies now regarded as classics which missed out on Oscars to films which we rate as vastly inferior. In contrast, consider the bloated reputations that later deflate like balloons: no one wants to go down in history as Salieri or Leigh Hunt.

So I suspect most artists feel unsure of their success and whether it is truly merited. We like to imagine that success is mainly down to talent because this feeds our need for an orderly, logical world with clear causes and effects and due desserts, and also bolsters our belief that modern society is meritocratic. But even a moment’s thought makes us doubt this. In the past, for instance, it was almost impossible for a woman or anyone from the lower classes to become a recognised artist. A lot of effort has gone into rectifying this and unearthing artists from the past who were unjustifiably neglected, and we like to think that things are different nowadays and talent is always rewarded, and that fame is available to anyone who has that special something. While there may be a grain of truth in this, in some ways we have merely exchanged the tyranny of a world of influential contacts and patrons for the randomness of the market place. In a world where many more people have at least some free time to paint or write a novel or practise a musical instrument, and where everyone is encouraged to see themselves as creative and a potential artist, the competition is fierce and getting noticed above the noise is incredibly difficult.

So successful artists need naked ambition as well as talent. I read an article recently by someone who claimed that Bowie had told her that he would sell his soul to be famous, and I’m sure he was far from alone. More than ever perhaps in the internet age, successful artists need to be able to work the room. They also need a big dollop of luck. I sometimes wonder if this means that those who do become famous fall victim to imposter syndrome when it is clear what a big part luck plays in artistic success and they sense that, without the cachet of their name, they would be back among the also-rans. Or if they worry that posterity will take the shine off that glittering reputation, while relative unknowns like Cezanne and Van Gogh slip through and are promoted in their place and get the equivalent of their handprints set in concrete in Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

I began this essay by calling myself a failed writer, but I’ll conclude by saying that in some ways there is not that huge a difference between failure and success. Any artist, however much success they enjoy, has to find something more permanent and meaningful than fame, and this can only ever be the art itself. Whether working with words or paint or marble or a camera or guitar, we artists are privileged to be doing what we do. I know this risks sounding cheesy, but the joy of creating something out of nothing except our imagination, and a love of, and deep respect for, the art form we work in have to be what inspire us, not a place on a pedestal. Do the work, and then put our creation out there and let the world do what it wants with it. In this sense, Kipling was right.

ART & INFORMATION OVERLOAD

In some ways, we are the luckiest generation ever. We have masses of information literally at our fingertips, a luxury of riches which would have been unimaginable to past generations. For much of the past, the study of painting, for example, was a privilege largely available only to the rich, who had the leisure time and the money to travel to art galleries around the world. In the field of literature, meanwhile, I can now instantly look up a word I am thinking of using to check whether I am using it correctly, or to be sure that I’m spelling it right, or to find a list of possible synonyms in order to avoid repetition or to get the mot juste. Similarly, if I’m working on an essay, I can do a quick Google search and include information which makes me sound far more erudite than I am. No other generation has ever enjoyed this immediate and effortless access to so much knowledge. However, this is a mixed blessing, and this essay will focus on some of the problems arising from this abundance of goodies, specifically in the fields of art and literature, before going on to offer some thoughts about its more general negative effects.

With regard to painting, books showing the great works of the past have existed for many years, but the reproductions tended to be black-and-white, poor in quality, and limited in number because of the cost of illustration, particularly in colour. This meant that good art books were often very expensive, priced well out of the range of the poor. They also tended to focus on a handful of ‘Old Masters’ – Titian, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt – or a select list of the ‘modern greats’ – Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Van Gogh – but it was far more difficult to find out about their obscure contemporaries who were largely neglected and forgotten. In contrast, we can now see online reproductions of the works of both artists who are household names and those who are little known, who lived in the distant past or are our contemporaries, and who come from every corner of the globe.

In theory, this should be a wonderful asset for anyone hoping to become a working artist. Rather than going to their local gallery and copying its very limited offering of paintings in order to hone their skills, they can surf the internet and access the websites of the finest galleries in the world and see a bewildering range of different styles and approaches from across the centuries and from a range of cultures. There is no longer any need for them to study under a master in his studio, as often happened in the past, being required to finish off some of the minor details in the master’s work while slowly learning and building up their own skills. No such lowly position is necessary for modern wannabes. They can gain inspiration from pictures on the net and, as the cliché goes, the world is their oyster.

However, is this abundance always such a boon? Having more models to learn from as a step in their artistic development means more choices to make and there is the danger that the neophyte flits from one style to another, never really settling on one, and ends up an artistic dilettante who never develops a truly individual style. The potential artist also cannot watch the master at work and follow how he creates his piece or uses his brush or mixes his palette: all he or she sees is the finished product detached from any context outside the canvas. And while it may help the isolated artist living in the back of beyond to have a virtual community, it is doubtful if this is ever as stimulating or as supportive as daily (nightly?) discussions in real cafes and bars.

The modern lover of art will also see most paintings on screens these days. This may not seem radically different from the previous generation’s reliance on illustrations in books, but I suspect that the internet makes us more promiscuous. Books on art written by experts do some of the structuring of ideas for us because they tend to focus on one artist, or a group of artists who worked together, or one period and place, which creates a kind of fundamental ordering of the data. (Admittedly, this is not always an unalloyed blessing because it can blunt some of our instinctive reaction to works by placing them in pre-existing categories.) In contrast, on the internet we are free to click to our heart’s content, flicking from French landscape painting to Japanese ukiyo-e to the works of Frida Kahlo, and I fear that we can end up sated by this flood of images, unable to make sense of this glut, uncertain about how to evaluate it, unsure which works we might learn from or wish to emulate if we are artists, or how to react to radically different works if we are not.

Viewing art mostly in books and on the internet also has stylistic repercussions. Screens (and glossy reproductions in books) flatten the art work and remove much of its material presence. Looking at a painting on a page in a book or on a computer screen is a very different experience from seeing the same painting in a gallery: its two-dimensionality is emphasised, any texture of the brushstrokes is often lost, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the reader gets no sense of the work’s size or scope. Sculpture in particular suffers horribly since we cannot walk around it and share its space, but have to be satisfied with merely imagining ourselves doing so, plus, of course, we can only see it from one angle. Also, the material of which the sculpture is made is a crucial part of the work, and in books and on the screen this tends to become reduced to its visual properties seen from a distance.

One final concern I would like to mention (although I could have listed several more) is that the ubiquity of famous images can suck out almost all of their power. Who can see any of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with a fresh eye now, having seen them reproduced on tea towels and coffee cups, or Munch’s Scream, when it is photocopied above a list of exam dates and has gained an almost comical edge? Unless we dig deep, Constable is forever associated with biscuit tins and chocolate boxes and jigsaw puzzles, making him seem conventional or even twee, although in some ways his landscapes were a departure from both the French and English traditions. This reflects the superficiality which is always a threat with a mass of information, all of which we cannot possibly absorb: we learn the cliché only, what is most obvious. And all we can end up claiming is, to quote from a song popularised by Earl Hines in the 1950s: ‘I know a little bit about a lot of things’.

In many ways, the changes wrought by modern technology have not been as radical for the wannabe fiction writer or poet, probably because novels and anthologies have always been more freely available and are more or less the same regardless of the medium we use to read them (although personally I feel that my poems subtly change when I read them on-screen compared to when I see them on a page in a book). Unlike a painting or sculpture, there is little of Benjamin’s ‘aura’ in a particular iteration of a piece of literature because its impact is generally unaffected by where it is written (although the difference between a poem read aloud in public and one read silently in a private study is obviously very marked).

One key difference between art and literature is that the online world has done little to dislodge dealers and galleries from their role as the ultimate gatekeepers in the art world, whereas publishing has changed enormously over the first quarter of this century, with options such as self-publishing and online webzines democratising the world of writing to some extent (the same has been true of music). Anyone can put their work on the internet and hope that it goes viral (the sad reality is that it almost never does, of course), and try to bypass completely the traditional routes, although I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of this as a road to success – there are literally millions of books out there which sell almost no copies at all (I know this all too well, as a writer of some of those books). And for every Arctic Monkeys, there are thousands of bands languishing in obscurity.

I think one contemporary trend driven mainly by modern technology which is not helpful to writers is that genre has become all-important. Whereas we tend to stereotype artists as individuals, in fiction the focus is on genres, and it is often writers who pin these labels on their own work: go to the online sites for groups of people who hope to become professional authors and the discussion is dominated by genre. It is true that painters are sometimes coralled into tight categories or placed within a movement or -ism, but I think the process is more relentless with fiction writers, who have a greater number of slots into which they can be fitted: thriller, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, detective, literary, gothic, and so on. In my opinion, these rigid categories encourage wannabe authors to place their writing in a sort of box and limits their imagination, and to focus too much on the selling of their work rather than the work itself. I am especially concerned about the category of ‘literary fiction’, which encourages the idea that this is somehow superior to other work, which can be relegated to the level of ‘genre’, something commercial and inferior. (This is nonsense, as a quick read of Chandler shows, or indeed of some of the pretentious trash which calls itself literary fiction.)

Another problem writers face because of modern information overload is that the internet tempts all of us to read rapidly and impatiently. I’m certainly guilty of this: I read more restlessly online, always thinking of the next article or the next poem rather than giving time and thought to that which is in front of me. I find it hard not to believe that the sheer quantity of stuff available is leading to a reduction in quality. I’m not just thinking of grammatical errors or lexical carelessness such as the famous distinction between ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’ which so agitates language mavens, but the general slapdash nature of so much online writing. I recognise that journalistic writing has always had this trade-off between speed and quality, but it seems that the latter is now often totally sacrificed for the sake of the former. But I can’t blame writers for this: why should they bother to write carefully, to take time to choose exactly the right word or to use language with sensitivity, if the reader’s approach is that of someone gulping down junk food in McDonalds? I honestly believe that we are losing some of our sensitivity to language, especially written language, in a modern world dominated by images, and our writing is becoming increasingly coarsened as a result.

This is where I broaden out my argument to claim that the internet is coarsening our culture in general, and not only on a linguistic level. I know I am sounding like an old curmudgeon wrapping myself in nostalgia about an idealised past, but I’m not denying the huge positives of the virtual world and the wonderful opportunities it offers. I simply feel that the level of public discourse has declined, with cultish conflicts exacerbated by too much time spent in echo chambers, in a world where emoticons are a cheap and instant solution to the problem of trying to say exactly what we mean or feel. And that knowing so much about the world at a superficial level is not really making us more informed and is certainly not making us happier: as surveys show again and again, levels of happiness have dwindled in the west over the past fifty years. In my opinion, the decline in the standards of art and literature over this period is symptomatic of a larger malaise. With twenty-four hour news and an avalanche of random information, we know too much about a world we cannot change or even influence and this is making us simultaneously cynical and depressed.

Ultimately, however, we cannot unlearn modern technology any more than we can unlearn splitting the atom, so we have to live with the consequences of a virtual world that bombards us with information 24/7. I only hope that we will adapt to this new reality and that it becomes a normal, but not an overwhelming, part of everyday life. Then perhaps we can make the most of what it offers while avoiding its potential to coarsen not only Art, but what it means to be human.

ART & THE CANON

As a baby-boomer who came from a working-class background, went to a grammar school in a working-class area, and learned about middle-class culture there, I’ve been confused about the canon for most of my life. At my school, courses were arranged based on a bizarre hierarchy: the most academically gifted were taught Latin, while the middle stream did Metalwork, and the lowest stream got Woodwork! In English literature I was introduced to Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth and Keats in poetry, Dickens and Hardy in the novel (although apparently neither of these made the Leavisite canon), and Shakespeare in drama. This, I was confidently told, was the best literature the world had ever produced.

Young people with a similar background to mine became part of an academic generation that challenged this ranking, removing the study of literature from the realm of aesthetics to place it in the fields of politics and sociology. This generation argued that these works were highly regarded not because of some innate artistic superiority, not because they were Arnold’s ‘the best that [had] been thought and said’, but because they were markers of belonging to an elite social class. The establishment, which wanted a semi-educated, domestic comprador class to serve as clerks and minor administrators, and therefore provided an education for working-class children like me who might prove useful in these roles, had created a Frankenstein monster that was out of their control. Both in school and in society at large, to paraphrase Julie Walters in Educating Rita, I learned which books to read, which paintings to like, which wine to order. Plus, crucially, I gained the critical tools that were necessary to scrutinise and question my social superiors.

I can say in all honesty that I didn’t actively seek this change and I wasn’t putting on airs and graces (at least not consciously), although I imagine a lot of my classmates thought I was. I didn’t feel comfortable in my social class, though, possibly because I was gay and I saw working-class culture as homophobic (before I realised that middle-class culture was also homophobic, but expressed this in a different way), so I probably welcomed my chance to climb out of my class of birth. But my move upwards into the cultural middle classes wasn’t smooth, and in reality part of me remained a working-class kid with working-class tastes. There was the kitsch ornament I bought my mother, an ersatz Swiss cottage with a little man in lederhosen and a little woman with plaited hair (which she loved, but I grew increasingly embarrassed about), and the truly awful dress I bought for a female friend (which she was kind enough to pretend was just what she wanted). Dazed and confused, I was Rita as she found herself in the middle of the movie.

This is a long introduction to show where I stood by the time I went to university in my mid-twenties, having broadened my cultural knowledge way beyond the scraps of the English canon that I had been taught at school, partly through my tiny local library (which of course no longer exists). It was there that I first discovered Ibsen and Strindberg, the ideas of Freud and Jung, plus the works of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. The counter-culture of the time also played a large role by introducing me to American novels like Catcher in the Rye and On the Road and the poems of the Beat Generation, plus my first taste of both jazz and what came to be known as ‘world music’. I had reached the ideological position I have held since then with regard to the canon, an uneasy equilibrium which swings first one way and then the other, with little real change or development. I believe that the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies was right in its insistence that aesthetic taste is a reflection of social class, but at the same time I can’t accept a relativism which places Coronation Street on the same level as King Lear. And I’m uncomfortable with the School’s approach to Art, which I feel relied too heavily on critical theory and not enough on aesthetics.

Many people claim that the canon is dead and we have killed it. Certainly there has been a mingling of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture so that few feel the same sense of confidence in the unquestioned superiority of the former. People are more willing to express their own tastes, to admit to the ‘guilty pleasure’ of watching TV soaps or liking disco, or to say that they find Bergman’s films boring and depressing, and these days even judges know who the Rolling Stones are. University degree courses about the arts (when they still exist – only today I read of mass job cuts at Goldsmiths) are as likely to include Noh or Kabuki as Restoration Comedy in their curriculum or focus on native Australian sand paintings rather than French neo-classicism. In academia, especially, there has been a levelling of aesthetic reputation that traditionalists argue is the pernicious influence of ‘woke’, but which most academics working in the arts seem to accept and generally support.

This is partly because the canon continues to expand. New entries have always been allowed in, of course: the canon was never the rigidly fixed closed shop that is its stereotype, a famous example being the inclusion of the previously neglected Metaphysical poets, largely due to the efforts of Eliot. Moreover, this expansion of the canon has speeded up and looks set to continue to do so. Entire fields have been added to the core, as art forms like film and photography gained respectability and their experts introduced their own sub-canons to the archive. The modern canon, if it still exists, is far more than the handful of dead white names that I learned at my grammar school.

The main motor for this in the contemporary age is technology, and especially the internet. It is now possible to learn about and explore any branch of art, no matter how obscure, and sometimes, as in the case of K-Pop or manga, these go viral and global. Devotees of the traditional western canon are increasingly coralled into their tiny corner of this virtual world and often come across as a little odd and very antiquated. Scruton, whom I mention in an earlier essay, was one of the few virtual champions of what was until fairly recently designated western culture’s finest. But he was helpless against the flood of advocates of popular genres online and this steady drip of influence may have done as much as anything else to erode the traditional canon, especially in music.

When we turn to possible cultural reasons for the decline of the canon, modern dread of elitism must be a key factor. A stigma is now attached to the middle- and upper-classes (for example, surveys show that more than half of the English population would call themselves ‘working class’, including many who grew up and continue to live in leafy suburbs), and, in a country where a few twangs of estuary English can be heard even on the lips of the younger members of the royal family, it must be tempting to conceal a passion for grand opera. We are all ‘the people’ now and, in terms of our public persona, it is better to be lower class than bourgeois (the reality, of course, is a little different, since no one wants to relinquish the benefits of membership of the bourgeoisie; they just seek the salt-of-the-earth kudos of belonging to a proletariat that no longer exists in its classical form). Underlying all this is a moral relativism that suits everyone, both leftists who want to parade their closeness to the people and rightists who are happy to live with this relativism as long as it diverts attention from their social and economic privilege.

The move away from Leavisite close reading and towards approaches such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, reader-response, post-structuralism and postmodernism also did much to undermine the canon by weakening the artwork as the primary source of meaning. The worth and the meaning of a work of art now largely exists outside of the painting or poem or piece of music. At the same time, the artist has lost his or her central role as a sort of messenger injecting meaning into the work which it is then our task as readers to decode. The contemporary fondness for personal narratives with its love of biographical detail might be expected to reinstate the artist in this central role, but in reality has done little to counter this move towards theory, probably since it is often closer to chitchat and gossip than anything we might term analysis. Almost everyone knows that Van Gogh was mad, cut off his ear and painted sunflowers, but few are aware of The Potato Eaters.

So most modern people are trapped between two options regarding the canon, neither of which we feel totally comfortable with. We are no longer happy to let dead or even living white males dictate what is good and what isn’t, so we accede to the lazy relativism of ‘whatever floats your boat’ with regard to the arts, but at the same time we can’t quite relinquish our need for standards and judgements, as listening to people argue about the film when they come out of a cinema makes clear. While we claim that taste is simply personal and it’s only snobbery to suggest that King Lear is better than Coronation Street, we can’t resist the urge to compile top-ten or top one-hundred lists in articles or videos about popular music or movies, as if we can never quite give up our need to evaluate things and then place them in hierarchies.

Maybe we are moving away from a canon rooted in aesthetics or class and back towards one based on morality and on whether a particular artwork meets our required principles on social or political or ethical issues, back to the world of Tate’s King Lear. We find it difficult to accept work from the past which was created in a very different social universe, especially with regard to gender and race but not limited to these issues, so we struggle to relate to religious art before and during the Renaissance, for example, and reject a lot of later work because of its political content: Kipling’s white man’s burden or Conrad’s heart of darkness. I’d like to make clear that I’m not singling out woke for attack here; social conservatives are just as guilty of judging work by moral rather than aesthetic standards in our current fondness for waging culture wars. Mary Whitehouse in her famous speech about ‘the dirtiest programme [she had] ever seen’ had as little interest in aesthetics as do people who nowadays want to bowdlerise Till Death Us Do Part or Rising Damp or Fawlty Towers. Art for Art’s sake seems to have become a minority cause, although unsurprisingly I think it is still rather popular among artists themselves.

Perhaps I am out of date and the canon has already been superseded, or at least has been so radically dislodged that it has ceased to have any real cultural influence, or been extended so widely that it has become too thin to hold much meaning in contemporary life. In our age of mass information, it is impossible for any individual to confidently call themselves connoiseurs of all the arts. The best we can do is to know a little about a wide range of artists and art forms, with all the dangers of superficiality that this entails. But while we may have officially given up on the canon, perhaps we have not replaced it with anything other than a lazy, under-theorised, and perhaps insincere laissez-faire. Either that, or we are now trapped in an endless, pointless culture war where a struggle is going on to define a new canon based on openly defined moral standards rather than aesthetic principles. As someone who writes poetry, I can’t claim to be neutral in this argument, but in my opinion this moralistic canon would not represent an advance.

ART & AUTHENTICITY

Good art requires both technical prowess and a kind of inner truth, a quality we might broadly label ‘authenticity’. Technical ability is very easy to recognise in most of the arts: no one is ever going to pick up a violin for the first time and make anything other than an awful screeching noise. It is less obvious in literature: in theory, someone who has never written a poem could write a brilliant one at their first attempt, even if this is highly unlikely. And once we get to the art of acting, especially on film rather than on the stage, amateurs and first-timers have sometimes created moving and convincing performances (with the guidance of a director, of course). Generally, though, it is clear that technical ability increases with practice and is easy to identify, and arguments are not common about the level of technical skill a particular artist holds. Partisan fans might squabble over whether Clapton or Beck is the supreme rock guitarist, but no one is going to argue that Madonna has a better voice than Callas.

Authenticity is much more difficult to pin down. We all feel that we know it when we encounter it, but we are far less likely to agree on whether it is there in a specific work of art. Yet, in contemporary views of Art that owe so much to Romanticism, it has come to be seen as an essential quality of good work. The late Roger Scruton, for example, argued that many of what he saw as the problems of 20^th century art stemmed from a fear of the kitsch which results from a combination of technical virtuosity and a lack of authenticity. He used this as a criterion, for example, when comparing the Birth of Venus by Botticelli with that of Bouguereau, acknowledging the great technical skill of the latter but judging that it lacked the sincerity of the former (a judgement with which, for what it’s worth, I agree, although I doubt that I could articulate exactly why).

So what is this authenticity which we all claim to recognise, whether self-styled iconoclasts like many modern artists or dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Scruton? Attempts to define it tend to be circular, using synonyms such as honesty or genuine feeling. But is it ultimately anything more than a subjective claim to praise the works of art that we personally enjoy?

First of all, it cannot be separated from, but certainly cannot be reduced to, social class. Folk music and pop music, for example, are often regarded as more sincere in their simplicity than classical music in its complexity, and part of the reason for this is because they generally come from, and are enjoyed, by a lower social class or by the masses. While it may no longer be essential to know the prescribed canon of writers, painters and composers – the ‘dead white males’ – in order to be considered erudite and sophisticated, new canons have coalesced around the art which has attempted to ignore or shatter or expand this canon. Movements such as Art Brut and Pop Art in painting, and blues and punk in music, have stressed and valorised authenticity. An avant-garde which arose in the 19^th century with the aim of épater les bourgeois, (although it was itself largely a bourgeois phenomenon), remains an important aesthetic force even in the new millennium.

As claims for the universality of the canon crumbled, virtues such as honesty and reality rushed in to take the place of former certainties. Middle-class culture became the target of much avant-garde criticism since it was seen as intrinsically fake. Films like Trainspotting and Bicycle Thieves are regarded as more sincere than the likes of Brief Encounter, with the suffering of the characters in the latter treated less sympathetically as a result of their suburban middle-class setting. Heroin addicts are authentic; not so doctors and housewives with plummy English accents who are having a guilt-ridden affair which is not really much of an affair.

Also, certain genres come with a built-in social class attached. When I write a poem, I’m working in a genre which is seen by many as elitist and which often either bores or intimidates people. Painting and sculpture come with similar baggage, especially if they involve sharks or piles of bricks. However, when people respond to less socially exalted art forms – for example, blockbuster films and pop music – they no longer feel intimidated and are ready to pass critical judgement on what they see or hear. Less prestigious art forms, however, slowly gain respectability once the people who enjoy them become academics and start to publish papers about them and university departments are created in order to analyse them, and the masses begin to feel distanced from them and lose confidence in their ability to judge, or even enjoy, them: the transition of jazz from a popular form of music to a ‘difficult’ one which is not for the hoi polloi is a clear example.

The rise of critical theory that focuses on the political or sociological aspects of works of art and sees them as products of a whole culture rather than the work of an individual genius has strengthened this way of evaluating them, and the poorer and/or more exotic the culture from which the work originates, the more authentic the art is often judged to be. We may feel that we are far more sophisticated than in the days of Gauguin and shudder at what we view as his colonialist appropriation, but we are still far from cleansed of the same attitudes, and not just with regard to distant regions of the globe. Blues scores highly on the authenticity meter because of its roots in oppression and poverty, as does rap for its origins in inner cities. Eventually, though, these forms lose their aura of authenticity as they spread into the mainstream and artists are accused of ‘selling out’. Authenticity thrives in the margins, but wilts in the centre.

Another factor that may explain this desire for authenticity is the vital importance for artists in a modern age of branding to have a ‘unique selling point’, which in turn creates a need for a narrative or backstory attached to them. Whereas the artwork once informed the story, increasingly the backstory informs the artwork. I imagine many people, if asked for a paradigm of the authentic painter, would cite Van Gogh. But this is the result of his life story – the mental illness, the self-harm, the fact that he was a commercial failure during his lifetime – as much as any intrinsic aesthetic qualities in his work, and downplays the sophistication of his ideas about painting, which is very clear in his letters to Theo. Compare the public image of Matisse, for example, with his tired businessman relaxing in his armchair. The two painters shared ground-breaking use of colour and a sharp theoretical interest in this, but their eventual public personas could hardly be more different.

The stereotype of the suffering artist is accompanied by an (often unspoken) belief that suffering and pain are somehow authentic whereas joy and beauty are deeply suspect, leading to a lower ranking of painters who are derided as ‘decorative’ – a word which is only just behind ‘elitist’ as a contemporary insult. Modernism prided itself on expressing the truth, warts and all, and, although often rigorously formal, was wary of too much beauty. Postmodernism picked up the baton, despite its general antipathy towards Modernism, enabling artists such as Koons to create kitsch with a wink in his eye and join the ranks of the authentically inauthentic. Thus artists could become famous (and rich) while retaining their claim to be subversive. In my opinion, however, it is a long time since Art was genuinely subversive and we have spent the best part of a century producing knock-offs of Duchamp’s urinal. At the same time, awareness of the avant-garde has spread beyond a privileged class of aesthetes. We may be living in a world where the mega-rich get richer by the day, but we are bought off with the myth that we are all equally middle-class at a cultural level, at least in the developed west.

Modernism, which in many ways emphasised structure and form, also paradoxically played a huge role in the rejection of form. In the world of poetry, for instance, there are now magazines which categorically refuse to publish poems which rhyme or have a regular metrical pattern because these are seen as less spontaneous, and therefore less sincere, than free verse. I don’t doubt that most modern poets working in free verse give just as much time to polishing their work as their rulebound predecessors, but there is often a pretence that this does not happen and all evidence of planning and effort must be expunged. First thoughts are seen as more authentic in this late blossoming of the myth of Romantic genius.

So far the thrust of this essay has been to call out authenticity as a chimera at best and a self-serving myth at worst. However, the reality is much more nuanced. In a post-Romantic world where Art often functions as a kind of shadow to a dominant Science, authenticity has become perhaps the key criterion for judging works of art, and this is true not only at the level of ‘high-end’ artistic criticism. For example, many young people of my generation welcomed the arrival of punk with its three chords because it was a reaction against what we saw as the pretensions of progrock, with its rock operas and fifteen-minute guitar solos. Images of working-class youth culture became an essential background to punk, advertising its authenticity, even for bands whose background was actually solidly suburban. This reflects a world where, in the modern UK at least, surveys show that a majority of people identify as working-class despite growing up in suburbia and attending university.

As the gap between High Art and Popular Art narrowed or largely disappeared, and everyone grew less confident about the status of artworks, authenticity took up a lot of the slack as a rubric for evaluation. When I was growing up, I remember watching TV programmes which featured Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grappelli performing together in each other’s musical genres. At the time this was billed as something exciting and radical: a meeting between classical music and jazz. But what it showed to me was how important authenticity had become and how this was rooted in genre: the former was a much better classical violinist and the latter a superior jazz violinist. Hardly surprising, I know, but there was something ineffable in their playing that could not be reproduced by someone outside of their training, background and culture, even by other musicians of consummate skill, and which formed an undeniable authentic core of their work. There are clearly times when technique alone is not enough of a criterion for judgement. Few would suggest that Holiday had the technical perfection of Fitzgerald or Vaughan, but many would see her as the greater artist.

I guess I am ultimately saying that while there is a lot that is inauthentic about the modern obsession with being authentic, I cannot help but feel that the very best art – whether Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience or Goya’s Black Paintings or the music of the Velvet Underground – must have some kind of inner honesty, a deep authenticity, no matter how difficult it may be to isolate and define this. The problem is how to acknowledge this honesty without succumbing to an uncritical relativism where we simply claim that the work we like has this quality and that’s the end of the discussion. The examples of authenticity which I have listed above are my choices but you almost certainly have different ones. Can we ever go beyond this subjectivity?

ART & EKPHRASIS

Ekphrasis was originally a term for detailed description of an object in poetry, most famously the shield of Achilles in The Iliad. Ancient poetry often told a story, so when the flow of the narrative was broken by long passages of description, it is not surprising that this was noted and theorised. Perhaps a modern(ish) equivalent might be the novels of Hardy, with their long stretches of description of nature which often irritate schoolchildren forced to study his work and which, in a less patient age where everything must be quick or even instant, threaten to break the flow of the action for the reader (although, as a bit of a language nerd, I personally enjoyed the passages of description more than I did the stories, where the setting and the culture were so different from my own that I could never really relate to it). But in contemporary usage, the meaning of the adjective ekphrastic has evolved and now generally signifies a work of art which is a response to an earlier work of art, often a painting, which serves as its source of inspiration. About a fifth of my poems in this book are ekphrastic in this sense of the word, based largely on paintings and painters, but also on a handful of songs and, in one case, a photograph.

This type of ekphrasis is never merely imitation. Copying has been a vital part of the process of passing on tradition in the arts, especially among painters, who during their formative years will often go to galleries and copy the ‘greats’ of the past as faithfully as they can in order to learn how to achieve the effects that their predecessors did. This kind of mimesis isn’t repeated exactly in literature or in music, where there is no material object to copy, but young hopefuls will often write or compose in the style of previous artists who inspire them as part of their search for their own distinctive style (for example, Reed’s and Bowie’s early efforts at writing Dylanesque songs before they realised that their talent lay in a different direction). While this shares some features of ekphrasis, it is radically different. Ekphrasis is only really possible once artists have found their own style and therefore do more than merely mimic the original source (although perhaps Bowie’s album Pin-Ups came close to some kind of hybrid between the two). Ekphrastic work is based on inspiration, not imitation.

So what does it mean when we say that one work of art inspires another? It is easy to sound pretentious when speaking of inspiration: part of me thinks of Julian and Sandy in Around the Horne, with Kenneth Williams shrieking, ‘The Muse is upon him, Mr Horne! The Muse!’. Maybe we should choose a more neutral word than inspiration but it’s hard to find one which doesn’t sound flat and uninspiring. And some will question why it should be necessary to turn to works of art as a source of inspiration when there is real life aplenty to inspire us. And finally, when we look at ephrastic art, what is the relationship between the original and the new work?

I can only speak for myself, of course, but for me a key motivation is a desire to pay homage to a work that has affected me profoundly. To claim that it changed my life might somewhat overegg the pudding, but contact with that work altered me as a person in some way. This is most true for me of various pieces of music. I became a teenager in the 1960s and was part of that generation for whom the music of the time was a defining reality: it made us who we were and we used it to show the world who we were. Also, songs rarely lose their place in our memory for some reason – perhaps the rhythm or the rhymes of the lyrics? – especially when they have formed part of our formative years. I can still remember the words of songs that I haven’t heard since I had a thick head of black hair, in contrast to painting, for instance, where I see a work I haven’t looked at for a long time and often find that I have changed it in my memory. For instance, I recently looked again at Munch’s The Sick Child to find that there was no open window on the left-hand side of the painting with sunlight streaming in, although that was how I had remembered it.

If it is hard to imagine writing an ekphrastic poem based on a work of art that we don’t like, this does not mean that our attitude towards the original must be fulsome or uncritically respectful, nor that we aren’t free to play around with it. The original becomes merely a starting point and our response to it can be anything from extremely close to tangential. In this book, for instance, my poem based on The Night Café follows the painting closely, referring directly to the people and objects in it and its dominant colours. In contrast, the one based on Loudon Wainwright III’s song, Saw Your Name in the Paper,distorts the original quite freely: I have chosen to read the song as a tale of a young girl who dreams of being an actress to comment on its theme of the nature of fame, while I suspect that the central character of the song was actually a young man, a rival artist, and the song is as much about ambition and jealousy as the vagaries of public success.

The relationship between the original work and its offspring can often be highly elliptical, in a way similar to that of Chinese paintings, where the ideographs that run down one side are a poem related to the picture, but the connection is often subtle to the point of tenuous. This dialogue within and between cultural artefacts has been a major theme in a lot of recent critical thinking in the west, and we have a succession of brain-frying ‘posts’ – post-structuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism – to give us impressive new ways to talk about what used to be called simply ‘influence’: intertextuality, hybridity, appropriation, dialogism, and so on. We certainly have become much more aware of the important role that the reworking of past material plays in the arts, and much more sceptical of the idea of the individual genius who makes revolutionary ruptures with the past to set art on a fresh course towards a brand new future.

We also need to ask whether ekphrasis in the modern sense is really such a new phenomenon. It has been happening since at least the ancient Greeks (for example, in the works of Aristophanes, although entwined there with genres such as parody and satire and pastiche), while the same classical tragedies inspired and influenced French neo-classical drama in the totally opposite spirit of adulation. Perhaps ekphrasis has become more common in contemporary art than in the past, but this may merely reflect an age when access to works of art is easily obtained, if only virtually. For example, of the paintings which I use for my ekphrastic poems, the only one I have seen outside of books or the internet is the Van Gogh. Fifty years ago I would not have had access to some of the paintings I have made the source of the ekphrastic poems I have published here, but we now have sources of inspiration at our fingertips.

Several criticisms might be made of ekphrastic work. First, it can be argued that it is elitist because the reader needs to be familiar with the original in order to fully appreciate the resultant work. Personally I have my doubts about this idea. It seems to assume that all ekphrastic work is going to refer to ‘high’ culture such as Wordsworth or Velasquez, but popular art aimed at the masses often relies on a similar reservoir of cultural knowledge: someone who goes to see the latest Harry Potter movie will often be very familiar with the book that inspired it, but I doubt if anyone would see this as an example of elitism. In my own case, the ekphrastic poems in this book which refer to well-known paintings might well draw on ‘elitist’ familiarity with these works, but the pieces of music I have used were part of popular culture at the time of their release, even if none of them were as well-known as the hits of the Beatles or Stones. Plus, of course, there is no such thing as total obscurity any more: readers can always google or Youtube the original.

Another possible criticism is that drawing from previous works of art to forge our own work covers up a lack of genuine creativity, but what exactly does this mean? Is being inspired by a cultural artefact somehow less real than being inspired by something in nature? Why would a poem that responds to Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, for instance, somehow be less genuine than one which is written while staring at a field of real daffodils? Also, I repeat my earlier statement that ekphrasis is not the same as simply mimicking an original and producing Psycho 5 or Star Trek 7. In many ways, it is the very opposite: the new work must stand up in its own right and not be a pale shadow of some well-worn formula. Bacon’s reworking of Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X is a perfect example of ekphrasis which resulted in a radical new work that is both stunningly original and high in quality.

I have rather more sympathy with the related criticism that ekphrasis can lead to a kind of dryness, the working and reworking of old material until the lode is totally exhausted. This has been a key idea in postmodernism: that we are suffering from cultural fatigue and doomed to merely mix and match the past in new combinations. This reflects a deep ambivalence in our culture with its roots in consumer capitalism: we want to believe in our unique individuality and yet we consume mass-produced brands in order to express that individuality. A lot of modern western art has played around with this idea and wallowed in its irony. On one level, for example, an audience needs to be familiar with postmodern ideas in order to appreciate Koons by being in on the joke. On the other hand, a child could appreciate some of his work, pointing out, ‘Look, mommy and daddy, it’s a balloon dog!’ But ultimately I’m not sure I would call his sculpture using the Pink Panther, say, an ekphrastic work. I’d probably look on it as a comment on a cultural artefact rather than something inspired by it because the overwhelming emotion, at least it seems to me, is one of irony.

So I end this essay still not feeling at all confident that I can police the borders between ekphrasis and influence and commentary. All of these things are far from historically unprecedented and denote practices that unfold in a space somewhere between mimesis and creation, with an attitude that can vary from adulation to parody. Personally, I really enjoy using other works of art as a way of writing poems, both as an artistic challenge and as a way of thanking artists whose work has meant a lot to me. In short, I find it interesting and I find it fun. I also welcome it as a way to remember the past in an age where we often seem desperate to leave that past far behind.

ART & ORIGINALITY

I’m fortunate to have frequent conversations with my Chinese artist friend, Jiaxuan Yi. One of the things we often discuss is the difference between the modern west, where the history of painting has become a story of revolutions, a succession of -isms, and China, where the official narrative has been mainly one of continuity despite periods of radical change. However, it is easy to overestimate the difference between west and east in this matter: iconoclasm was discouraged, or frowned upon, for much of the history of western Art, while Jiaxuan Yi talks about a similar period of restriction in Chinese art in the Ming and Qing dynasties and compares this to what happened in France under the influence of the Académie. But in the west something seems to have fundamentally altered over the last couple of centuries and the breaking of rules and the stamping of one’s own signature onto a painting have become perhaps the qualities most valued in a painter. And what is true of painting is true, although probably to a lesser extent, of other art forms.

The roots of this change may lie in the decline of Christianity, which stressed our similarity to each other with a common destiny as creatures belonging to God, and its replacement by Humanism, which emphasises our uniqueness as human beings and the vital importance of the individual. Romanticism, with its myth of the inspired artist of genius, and then Modernism, with its confident rejection of past traditions, turbo-charged the trend. In the modern western world we are bombarded on all sides by a belief in the singular individual with an inner core that only s/he can truly discover, know and express. This pervades contemporary culture despite counter intellectual movements under the broad label of postmodernism, which was a reaction against, and challenged, this focus on the individual and stressed instead that there is nothing new under the sun.

But is modern art really so unique in its iconoclasm? Or have previous revolutions been just as radical but we don’t conceptualise them as such? Many historical figures (for example, Giotto or Dürer or Rubens) could be labelled revolutionary, but lived in times when this was less acclaimed as a quality in an artist, or could potentially be dangerous, and so they downplayed their radicalism and, like early scientists, were careful to avoid treading on the tail of the tiger. When the church was the patron of the arts, the boundaries within which any painter had to work were obviously restricted: subject matter had to be religious in nature, and had to be on message. A scholarly literati class played a similar role in the Chinese history of painting and calligraphy, based not on religious orthodoxy but on social hierarchy and what we would now call their cultural capital. As with the church in the west, they set the rules, and anyone who broke them was placed firmly outside the loop. In both west and east, revolutions were whispered rather than declared with fanfare. And yet they moved.

As patronage in the west began to shift from the church to the nobility and then to wealthy merchants, painting responded, especially in northern Europe, and the jump from religious tableaux to portraits and still lifes and landscapes, for example, is arguably as radical as the much later leap from realism to abstraction. It just appears less radical to us because we grew up in a world where portraits and still lifes and landscapes were part of a long-established artistic tradition. Then, in the modern world, the market took over as the decisive force, and a kind of branding became dominant. Artists at the mercy of the invisible hand, and the dealers who traded in those artists, aimed to help the hand a little by creating the branded artist with a unique essence which no other artist could offer. Some may find it disrespectful to speak this way of Art with a capital A, but, just as manufacturers of soap created an identity to differentiate their product from the competition, the art world found a way to highlight the idiosyncracies of their goods on sale by creating a kaleidoscope of artists and movements.

Rather than view the last 150 years as a period of unparalleled upheaval, therefore, it can be argued that the history of painting in the west has always been characterised by periods of stasis interrupted by eruptions of change, just as Kuhn’s stretches of normal science culminate in sudden paradigm shifts that push science forward in new directions. The same is broadly true of the history of art in China, where a huge change in direction took place between the Tang and Sung dynasties. Art evolves by fits and starts (as may even also be true of biological evolution, at least according to biologists who question our current understanding of the operation of Darwinian natural selection). Even allowing for all this, though, our contemporary lauding of originality for its own sake in the west feels different in degree from the past, with most modern artists hell bent on breaking the rules rather than working solidly within an existing tradition.

The extent to which artists can truly be original is therefore a vital question. Is originality possible, or are we merely rehashing the past in new combinations? Are our contemporary artists really that different from each other? And even if originality is possible, should it be our goal? Or are we all postmodernists now, happy to cut and paste and be described by a word that everyone once dreaded – ‘derivative’?

Let’s start by looking at an example of a work that does seem clearly – shockingly – revolutionary: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This seems a complete leap from what had gone before. Yet even here critics have been able to identify influences, from El Greco to Velasquez to African masks and ‘primitivism’. I have no idea whether something can come of nothing in quantum physics, but I feel confident that this cannot happen in Art. There are always predecessors. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine an AI algorithm with its billions of bits of data coming up with something as outrageous as Picasso’s work. It seems genuinely sui generis. Similar arguments could be made about The Rite of Spring and The Waste Land. These seem works that blast the history of Art into a new future and which are hard to explain as merely reworkings and new combinations of previous works. There is an organising principle at work, an intelligence, which AI, with its almost infinite databank of models from the past, appears to lack, at least for now.

However, it is much too simplistic to set Modernism and Postmodernism against each other as polar opposites. One of the key debates at the end of the last century centred on whether the latter was a rejection or a development of the former. Certainly many features that seem quintessentially postmodernist already loom large in Modernist work – collage in painting; found objects in sculpture; bricolage in literature; the shattering of the unified stage setting in Brecht and Piscator; the slipperiness of human identity in Pirandello; the mix of erudition and the demotic in poetry (‘Winter is icummen in, lhude sing Goddamm’); Duchamp’s teasing of the very concept of Art. Many of the key figures of Modernism became brands of their time, and some relished this role (Picasso, Dalí, Tzara, Breton, Marinetti).

Rather than dwelling on the cleft between Modernism and Postmodernism, therefore, I prefer to argue that two strands co-existed for most of the 20^th century. The first emphasised originality and Art as saviour or consolation in a post-religious age; the second emphasised repetition and Art as an ordinary extension of everyday life. This can be seen very clearly in the contrast between Abstract Expressionism and the Pop Art that followed and explicitly rejected it. It is easy to laugh at the pretensions of Abstract Expressionism and how seriously it took itself: Pop Art emerged to prick this bubble and bring Art back to the everyday, except cans of soup and cola were the new quotidian reality rather than vases of flowers and bowls of fruit. What survived and transcended both movements was the figure of the artist as individual hero: Pollock and Warhol created very different types of paintings but both were skilled performers who built up a public persona to represent their original brand.

The artist as brand has become a defining reality in the age of the marketplace. Despite the efforts of artists in Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Land Art, and so on to reject the work of art as product, painting and sculpture remain forms which are overwhelmingly material, with a final object which can be sold, and these forms can therefore be readily monetised. Tellingly, branding has probably reached its zenith in painting and sculpture and, in comparison, literature has seen a more low-key version of the trend. Yes, there are stereotypes – Beckett is gloomy, Kafka is paranoid, Joyce is unreadable – but this seems as much an attempt to encapsulate a complex reality as a desire to sell a product. Because works of literature are immaterial and reproducible as clones, they can never attain Benjamin’s aura in the manner of paintings and sculptures and, apart from buying the manuscript or a first edition, there is therefore far less opportunity for monetisation of a sacred object. Building an original brand becomes less crucial when there is no original to sell.

The closer we stand to things, the more we can see differences between them. So, while from our perspective we might look at Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich and stress what distinguishes them from each other, my guess is that 200 years from now, if civilisation survives, people other than experts will see an essential similarity in their work, just as the non-expert views a lot of early religious painting as a succession of madonnas and putti. Originality and a personal artistic identity doubtlessly exist, as unique as fingerprints or retina scans, but the gap between our current brands on offer is probably nowhere near as large as we imagine.

Our age is a weird mix of cultural singularity, borrowing and homogenisation – signature chefs, fusion food and McDonalds – and it is hardly surprising that a similar process is underway in the arts. We have songwriters like Simon going to South Africa and finding inspiration in the music there to create Graceland, but this co-exists alongside the opposite trend where practitioners of ‘world music’ incorporate aspects of popular American music into their work. Or indeed my friend Jiaxuan Yi equally happy in traditional calligraphy and western figurative painting. These are interesting times, and it’s very hard to predict what will emerge from them: a blossoming of art as influences criss-cross the globe and feed and stimulate each other, or a steady erosion of individuality until, like shopping malls, all art looks more or less the same wherever its origin.