Are we too comfortable for poetry?
by and published in Edition Seven of Pomegranate
It would be fascinating, if probably more than a little depressing for the verse-inclined among us, to do a national survey with the following question: ‘Has poetry had a significant impact on your life?’ The ‘Yes’ percentage might reach double figures. The reasons behind this have been the subject of so much debate and soul-searching that to write even the smallest comment on them almost seems futile. However, it struck me a while ago that in Britain at least, you might be able to see part of the answer through geography.
Take a quick jog past some of the titans of our contemporary poetry: Armitage, Duffy, Heaney, Hughes, McGough, Muldoon. One of the things they have in common is a non-London, non-south eastern background. My thought was this: maybe the places they come from and the communities they’ve lived in have had an effect on their involvement with poetry.
For example: for your average commuter, living in a pleasant town in Surrey, there is little reason why poetry should be important. He or she has (had?) a job to get on with in the City, and wants to spend evenings crashed in front of the TV, eating out, maybe reading a thriller in bed. A gross generalisation, but I imagine it’s applicable to a large portion of the population.
Who’d want to snuggle down and read something which says:
quite simply, you’re wrong,
there’s nothing at the end of this,
you’re not actually creating anything
(and cut the wealth creation comeback) .1
Not exactly light relief. But we are talking more about writing poetry than reading it, and as someone who has been recently and temporarily thrust into the scary world of the London commute, I can attest that most evenings, it’s a struggle to have thoughts that advanced at all.
It boils down to this: perhaps we are too cocooned in our worlds of TV and thriller novels, which provide for our intellectual relaxation after our busy day, to spare a thought for poetry. After all, the best poems are immediate, introspective, and often blunt (as above).
There are, of course, significant exceptions. Poems can be enormously funny, and can provide ‘light relief’. Moreover, the lines above were written by someone who has lived his whole life in the south east. Yet the big names above still stand.
Muldoon and Heaney might seem the easiest to explain. Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’ are well documented, and their influence is readily visible in many poems – as in Heaney’s powerful ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’. Yet beyond the obvious, direct influences, it is possible to argue that the experience of conflict and disagreement creates powerful emotions, which for some people, translate readily into writing. Colette Bryce, another poet from Northern Ireland, describes a car bomb in ‘Device’:
Dawn or before, the artist’s hour,
it is placed, delicately as a gift,
under a car in a street that will flare
to a gallery in the memory,
cordoned off and spotlit for eternity.
Everyone knows about the bombs, but maybe it takes the immediacy of living in that society to imagine the bomb as a ‘gift’, the bomber as an ‘artist’, or even to write about it at all. The strength of emotion generated by such extreme events could be seen as the crucial factor: living in a quiet, leafy London suburb, it is easy to agree with E M Forster’s assertion in A Passage to India:
‘Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim “I do enjoy myself” or “I am horrified” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror” – it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.’
Forster knew the quiet, pleasant life of the south east of England and it is his phrase ‘perfectly adjusted’ that really rings through here. Much of our population has become ‘adjusted’ into a comfortable existence through the past decades of ever-increasing prosperity. So it’s not surprising that the strongest poetic voices come from the outskirts, like troubled Northern Ireland, or the North of England, so often ignored by national news. Take Simon Armitage, who was a probation officer in Huddersfield. One imagines he was exposed to the unadjusted, louder side of life there. The side of life where a man
‘Épraised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.‘2
Similarly, it is difficult to imagine the raw power of Ted Hughes’ ‘Pike’ emerging from a cushy existence in Belgravia. There aren’t many models there for the violent alliteration of his ‘Tractor’, ‘streaming with sweat, / raging and trembling and rejoicing.’ It feels like only the cold Northern countryside could have invoked that.
It’s a trend which can be followed around the globe. The Chilean Pablo Neruda (apparently the biggest selling poet ever by quite a distance) lived through turbulent times in Latin America, and it is no coincidence that many of his poems sound like impassioned campaign speeches. In ‘The United Fruit Co.’ he rails against how US corporations dominate society while
‘indians fall over, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number’.
This idea of poetry flourishing on the margins rather than at the privileged ‘centre’ of society might be traced back (in the West at least) to the Romantic movement of the 19th century. It shared with Neruda the driving desire to ‘reclaim’ the language for the ordinary people. There is an attractive logic to this – it should be easy for words to become the tool of the dispossessed majority. After all, all you need is paper and pen.
All of this brings us back to the qualities of poetry mentioned above: simplicity, immediacy, and introspection. Many have suggested that these are qualities fast disappearing from the everyday lives of many affluent Westerners. While I’m not sure I completely ‘buy’ that theory, it ties in with the achievements of the poets listed above – people who have not come from the wealthy, busy, administrative centres of society, whether on a global or national level. To their names might be added people like Derek Walcott, or the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish. Both to some extent have spoken for the sidelined, and have become widely recognised.
So perhaps the geography of Britain’s leading poets does shed a little light on how we view poetry as a nation – showing that in places where emotions run higher, where there is conflict, where people are not ‘adjusted’ into a comfortable routine, there is more room for poetry. I do not mean of course to say that these are the only places that poetry can come from – that would be extremely depressing for people like me who have grown up in the sedate Home Counties. In fact, young people probably aren’t bound by many or indeed any of the patterns mentioned above. There just seemed to me to be a certain trend amongst today’s ‘established’ poets. As for the next generation, who can tell? Perhaps the credit crunch will have a profound impact on the children of today’s commuters. Perhaps we’re heading back towards a sort of simplicity. Just don’t bet on poetry sales overtaking celebrity biographies any time too soon.
1 From ‘Prophet’, by Peter Carpenter.
2 From ‘Poem’.
Paul Merchant
Paul Merchant is 18, and lives in Surrey. He is currently on a Gap year, and has just escaped to Peru from the nasty corporate world of London. His poems have been commended in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, and one has been published in The North.