O poetry! What will we do with you? You’re in the headlines again for the only reasons you ever are, ie the wrong ones.
This month the poetry journal PN Review published a takedown of Hollie McNish and the spoken-word poetry scene (and of me, as McNish’s editor, in an efficient sideswipe). The debate about whether hugely popular poets such as McNish, Kate Tempest and Rupi Kaur deserve the support of the “poetic establishment” spilled out into the wider world.
I have a lot of sympathy for the author of the essay, Rebecca Watts, and the presumably unwelcome attention she’s drawn for it. These demons we send out with a pat on the tail and a “Go-show-’em, killer!” always come flapping back home too soon. I know: I too was a young desperado of a critic, right up to my first (and wholly deserved) death threat, after which I decided that this was not the career for a coward with such a fundamentally lousy attitude. I hope Watts can parlay her brief notoriety into some attention for her own poetry, which is plainly excellent.
And her piece is a fun read, if it’s not about you. Though all I’d say is that if the purpose of good literary criticism is to persuade readers of your opinion, there was too much anger in it to do much more than harden their prejudices, one way or the other.
Watts is right to point out that remarks I made about performance poetry in 2004 (in the course of that year’s TS Eliot lecture) seem to contradict what I say today. I changed my mind, was all.
Obviously, you have distinct identities as a poet and a publisher, and I’m not paid to indulge the narrower of my own preferences: it would have been deeply remiss of me not to take notice of the burgeoning spoken-word circuit, which has seen the likes of McNish and Tempest recruit a vast new audience for poetry. My respect for it simply grew with my direct acquaintance.
Poetry is most definitely not a broad church, but nor does it consist of 40 mutually exclusive sects, like the Plymouth Brethren. One can worship at more than one altar. You don’t have to like them all (personally, the strange hymns of the experimental school still remind me too much of my time as a flame-tongued evangelical, even if I enjoy the sermons), but your allegiance to one alone can turn you into a poetic sectarian.
Spoken-word poetry might “fail” by Watts’ own favoured house rules but it has its own code, by which it deserves to be judged – a distinct aesthetic partly borrowed from hip-hop, where song-like rhythmic “flow” and ingenious rhyming and metaphor are often prized, but where “authenticity” seems valued most of all.
The spoken-word crowd can smell the inauthentic at a thousand paces. I wish the “page” poetry scene would show the same critical discrimination when they encounter poems that do little more than tick off this week’s fashionable signifiers, and that the poet clearly doesn’t mean a word of.
And just because Tempest, McNish and Kaur (whom few poets consider a poet at all) are all “accessible”, and Watts can’t stand them, doesn’t make them a genuine grouping. She might as well have added Ed Sheeran and kale, for all they’re alike.
Elsewhere, we’re in agreement. Watts says “technical and intellectual accomplishments are as nothing compared with the ‘achievement’ of being considered representative of a group identity that the establishment can fetishise”. I think that’s overstated, but it’s a brave thing to say these days.
I would add that we do young, first-book poets no favours through such rapid promotion, which can make them fatally self-conscious. You can’t yet say their work is game-changing, because that’s not how the game works. We might remember that the first published efforts of Keats and Auden met with as much bewilderment as praise, as the truly ground-breaking invariably does.
Low stakes and high blood pressure often go together, and poetry is not always the lovely supportive community some claim – especially on Twitter, which can strain the pure venom out of mild demurral. My own admiration of Tempest and McNish, I can assure her, is genuine; but Watts is also bang on when she says: “The middle-aged, middle-class reviewing sector […] is terrified of being seen to criticise the output of anyone it imagines is speaking on behalf of a group traditionally under-represented in the arts.”
But do you blame us, when every time we utter a word we either get gummed alive by some 20-year-old or have our every published remark audited for consistency? We can all work together to right the wrongs of the past, and still have space for honest disagreement. But we’re going to have to start by kicking open the doors between the rooms we’ve chosen for ourselves, rooms that reflect nothing but our own admirable taste.