Poetry, Evolution, and The Interpreter's House

Habitats

The UK has many Creative Writing degree courses now, generating more jobs and more poets. These poets have been brought up on newer (often US) influences, producing newer styles of poems. But where do they get published? At first it was difficult, marginal habitats being all that was available. Gradually however, magazines changed. Some (Weyfarers) disappeared, some (Iota) were taken over and rebooted by young editors. Book publishers were the slowest to change. When old editors didn't move aside, new publishers (e.g. Salt, Nine Arches) emerged and encroached.

Conditions for change

As well as a growing mass of poets, there were external conditions that encouraged change

• Lack of external threat and obligation - poets were no longer expected to produce marketable books or compromise for the general public. Certainly they weren't expected to speak for their generation. The energy freed from the need for self-protection or pronouncement could be used for experimentation
• Hot-house isolation - It became easier to incubate novelty in secure (academic), supportive surroundings, using the internet to find like-minds wherever they were.

Change

New genres emerge from old much as new species emerge -

• Mutation
• Combination - a fusion of 2 or more genres: magic realism for example. Some hybrids may be sterile.
• Arrested development (neotony) - e.g. a sketch treated as a finished work
• New habitats - a new media will encourage new or adapted genres
• Asteroids - New material might have arrived from elsewhere

The simplest mutations adjust the proportions of what already exists, perhaps removing some parts completely. A common recommendation is to chop the first few "set-up" lines of poems. Often the final, cloying closure's removed too. These minor mutations can set off a chain of changes - less reliance on narrative for example, more fragmentation. Before long a new species buds off from the evolutionary bough.

Adaption

Faced with habitat change, some older poets sought more congenial surroundings (e.g. when US Formalists found the going hard, some found a welcome in the UK). The risk of shrinking habitats broken up into isolated patches was ameliorated by the improved communication that the Internet offered. Some poets (e.g. Alison Brackenbury) were good enough to survive the changes without needing to change, others (e.g. George Szirtes) encompassed so much variety that change was just a matter of judicious selection.

The Interpreter's House (issue 59), June 2015

I found this magazine (Martin Malone's the main editor) an interesting read, and typical of the new breed of quality, relaunched periodicals. It shows how change and continuity can ride tandem. It contains 2 stories and about 60 poems, some of the latter being chosen by competition judge Liz Berry. Amongst the contributors are many Creative Writing students past and present, Ilkley and Bridport winners, and people with books by Red Squirrel Press, Enitharmon, Smith Doorstep, Shoestring, tall lighthouse, Nine Arches Press, Poetry Salzburg, Cinnamon, Shearsman, etc - in other words, impressive credentials, with far fewer mentions of esoteric publications than "Tears in the Fence" has. Significantly perhaps there's also nothing about older publishers like Bloodaxe and Carcanet.

I liked a few of the poems, and liked parts of others (though perhaps for inappropriate reasons). A few I thought suspiciously plain, as if I'd missed the point. The rest, though evidently crafted, were difficult for me, especially the competition pieces. Let me pick 2 examples by 2 clearly accomplished poets

• Here's the 1st section (of 4) from "What Colour Is The Sea?" by Rosemary Norman.

  Every evening a dog barks in the stairwell. Separate from our talk - though that too echoes off tiled walls - the bark's inflection's not unlike human complaint as if the dog hoped earlier for better.

  Norman's passage in itself makes prose sense, the dog used as analogy, though it sounds a mite strange, and doesn't work for me as an independent piece.
• Rob Miles' "A skinful" has

  A clown brought in to cheer, waves and turns two hoop-wands, as if to tantalise and sharpen the fingers of those screaming children with frogspawn. Let's you and I stroll over

  This is more puzzling - sharpen fingers with frogspawn? Is "Let's" a typo or a colloquialism?

In both pieces the line-breaks are beyond me, but that's nothing new. Nor are the part/whole issues. I'm happy to delay interpretation with no expectation of an eventual integrative aha!, but I still dwell on the parts individually and in combination. Both poems allude to (but aren't unified by) their title, though they leave it rather late -

• The final part of Norman's poem commences with mention of the (until now neglected) title - "The sea is greenish-blue,/ grey, silver, lilac -/ absurd this giving names// to colours picked up idly/ and returned/ all as one, with the sea's authority", which may be the presiding theme of the poem (something to do with inadequacy of language). The poem ends with "They'll hear it/ gather gulls' cries/ in its din total like silence. I can't parse that, unless it means that the din is as overwhelming as silence. "they" might refer to the colours or the third-person couple in part 3. I don't think it refers to the first-person people in the first part.
• Miles' poem ends with "there's this/ lustrous rainbow crazing on something// also taking a skinful, for a moment/ holding its own" which leaves me none the wiser, though I was expecting something about alcohol or intoxication.

I wondered how superficial the differences were between some of these poems and some typical older ones, whether they share the same template, varying only in surface fashion. I get Stuart Henson's piece (I suspect it's no coincidence that it's in rhyming couplets) and James Giddings' poem, perhaps because they're standard templates told more slant than usual. Several of the other pieces are slight mutations of standard templates -

• Sarah Westcott's "Bats" is only partly descriptive ("You cannot hear us but you'll feel/ our hunting song across your teeth/ defiling the laws of physics/ with frequencies beyond this")
• Tammy Adams' "Finger Plan" starts with a sort of palm reading, taking a page to imagine making the persona's hand into a giant city ("There is excited talk of an extra finger") before ending with "Or, one day, another hand/ might extend towards yours./ And you will want to take it.// What of your city then?". The closure is standard, the length and sprawl of the first section isn't. In Stalking the Typical Poem Jan Schreiber identifies a New Yorker poem template: "It is unmetered and unrhymed; It is focused on a particular event; Its details are slightly fantastical but not incomprehensible; It invites metaphoric or symbolic interpretation; It can be reduced to a simple, unsurprising observation; It ends inconclusively – in this case with an unanswered question". This poem's not so far away from that shape. Idle speculation suddenly clashes with reality.

In the context of such poems, some of the more prosaic pieces stand out more than they usually might. I don't get Jack Houston's piece, unless I've overestimated its intentions - it's prose with odd white space. Gary Wilson's straightforward "Sonnet" (Highly Commended) seems minor, beginning with "You said I ought to phone my wife and I/ agreed. Chinese veg in black bean sauce,/ a bottle of wine, chopsticks, colourless/ tea".

Meanwhile

The emergence of new species doesn't necessarily imply the extinction of the old, though the old may return to niches or seek pastures new. The Web is a new continent, offering new audiences and confrontations for poets young and old. New magazines and courses are appearing to cater for people suddenly interested in writing poetry. Such people tend to have an easy time with the older poetry.

Dana Gioia in "The Dark Horse"

Dana Gioia has an article in the 20th anniversary issue of "The Dark Horse". In it he points out that

• "there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice", p.11
• "Until quite recently, poets still assumed that the typographic text would be vocalized in some way", p.12

He thinks that "Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins", p.13. Inclusively, yes, but "effectively" is more controversial. He thinks that "Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought", p.17. Different, yes, but I'd contest that it's "a way of understanding and expressing existence". He then considers academia -

• "Critical analysis remains deliberately outside the full experience of the poem, which is physical, emotional, subjective, and intuitive as well as intellectual", p.16
• "The work of [The New Critics] represented a great moment in American intellectual history. Yet their immense success also had an enduring negative impact on the popularity of poetry", p.19
• "No one intended the decimation of poetry's audience or the alienation of the common reader. Like most environmental messes, those things happened as accidental by-products of an otherwise positive project", p.20

I think that critical analysis is less like that nowadays (we know what makes adverts and political speeches effective, and are more likely now to apply that knowledge to poetry), and I think that The New Critics weren't that massive. He suggests 2 ways to improve the situation -

• "to recognise the power of enchantment in teaching poetry", p.24
• "critics, scholars, and teachers need to recognize and respect non-conceptual forms of knowledge, which are fundamental to all literature, especially poetry ... These are often difficult elements to summarize in abstract terms, but their resistance to conceptual paraphrase reflects the limitations of criticism not the limits of art", p.24

He points out that "Poetry Out Loud has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. Two and a half million students have participated in the competition", p.23. Good news.

Apart from the points I've already made, I disagree with little he says, though when he uses the word "poetry" I understand it as having different meanings depending on context. There are different type of poetry. Some (free-form or formalist; sung or read) are popular with the public but not theorists, and v.v. Some are popular with both. That's not meant to be a value judgement, it's just how they are. I think that popular poems/songs are as popular as ever, nowadays often experienced on the move. I don't think that affects the popularity of serious poetry which has never been popular, though there have been times when the culturally engaged felt more obliged to buy the latest poetry books than they currently do, even if those books weren't read. Serious art - even modern art as displayed at Tate Modern) - has always been more popular.

There are biologists and flower-lovers. One interest may lead to the other, but there's no particular reason why it should. Flower-lovers may become formal flower-arrangers, or large-scale flower growers. Biologists may end up doing chemistry. That's just how things are.

My poetry rejections

The great Capablanca in his book "Chess Fundamentals" decided to show nearly all of his losses. It would take too long for me to do likewise here for my poems, but maybe there are lessons to be learnt from my failures.

Single poems

Magazine	Poems sent	Poems accepted
Iota	46	19
Rialto	46	3
Envoi	37	13
Acumen	36	6
Poetry Review	27	0
Magma	17	0
Poetry London	13	0
PN Review	13	0

Here are the extant magazines I've sent the most poems to ("Weyfarers" and "Other Poetry" aren't active nowadays), along with my success statistics. I usually send poems in batches of 3, so even if one of them's accepted that counts as 2 failures. The last 4 magazines in the table belong to a tier of publications that I'd like to appear in, though I can go years without sending them anything. I usually know when I'm beaten, but I keep trying with "[The] Poetry Review", especially when they have a new editor. I read somewhere that they accept 1 poem in 500, so I suppose I'm not doing too badly. I've been close with "Magma", corresponding with editors on rewrites, but nothing yet.

Collections

Recently I've looked back at my attempts to produce follow-ups to my Moving Parts pamphlet. Here are the near misses -

• From Poetry Wales -
  Poetry Wales is delighted to be able to finally reveal the results of the 2011 Purple Moose Poetry Prize. As always, it’s been a challenge for our judges, Zoe Skoulding and (judging the prize for the first time) John Barnie, but they have decided on a winner. And the Winner is: Archimedes’ Principle by Rebecca Perry. Congratulations Rebecca!

  In a slight break from the conventions of the last two competitions, the judges felt that, in addition to listing 3 or 4 highly commended entries, another collection warranted the recognition of being Runner-up: Facing Facts by Tim Love. Well done Tim.

  The winner’s work will be published by Seren

• From Cinnamon Press -
  The debut poetry collection prize 2014 was adjudicated by Matthew Francis. The finalists were: Patricia Helen Wooldridge, Philip Madden, Frances-Anne King, Tim Love and Jane McLaughlin and we are delighted to announce that the overall winner was Jane McLaughlin with her collection Lockdown which will be published in September 2016.

The winners of these competitions have both had more success than I - Rebecca Perry's become a Bloodaxe poet and Jane McLaughlin's been shortlisted in the 2013 Bridport prize, longlisted in the 2014 National Poetry Competition, etc - so part of me thinks that I was lucky to get as far as I did. But all the same, being this close is disappointing.

Conclusions

• Single poems - Magma has different editors each issue, so I should try them more.
• Collections - Looking at the short-lists makes it clear that several people repeatedly get close to being published. There are however only so many places one can send the same poem or collection to. Eventually some new poems are required. Or at least new selections of old poems. Perhaps I should be more bold in the poems I submit as a pamphlet. A pamphlet's not always the best place to display one's breadth. It can afford to be tightly-focussed - even unrepresentative.
  I've created various pamphlet selections, each with fewer odd-men-out in terms of aesthetic demands required by the reader. The pamphlets overlap, but that's a problem I can deal with later.

I've been looking for proverbs that express the idea that narrowly losing can hurt more than being nowhere near winning. There's "a miss is as good as a mile"; "close but no cigar"; "so near and yet so far", etc. but nothing comes to mind that expresses how one feels coming 4th in an Olympic final that you never thought you'd reach. Suggestions welcomed.