Poetry 2.0
by and published in Edition Five of Pomegranate
How modern is ‘modern poetry’? One hundred years after Pound et al, it can certainly be claimed that our collective poetic consciousness has fully absorbed the use of contemporary life as a subject, but sometimes I have my doubts. We live in a time when communication media are instant, pervasive, and literally everywhere, but I haven’t come across a lot of poetry which reflects this ubiquity. When was the last time you read a poem about texting, or email? Of course they exist, and given time I could probably siphon up a few examples, but unlike the technology they describe, they’re hardly waiting ready at my fingertips.
And more even than a poem about the use of these media, how often do we read a poem that mentions them casually, unshowily, as a simple present element in the world the poet describes? Maybe poets today are so subtle I’ve been missing it all along, but as I write this piece I’m having a hard time thinking of a poem that nods to the technology of the last ten years as easily as we mention cars or microwaves, as items unworthy of comment. The maxim goes that ‘every age gets the poetry it deserves’, but in certain areas I get the feeling we might still be waiting for ours.
Perhaps it’s because, fundamentally, poetry or even writing in general lags behind everyday speech. There are many reasons for this, not least the constraints of waiting to be published, but I think there’s also a certain squeamishness about using the language of now, here, not anywhere else, the words I reach for everyday as I type this in my bedroom in July 2008. Most creative types, although they probably wouldn’t admit to it, are secretly hoping in a hundred years time a retrospective editor will call their efforts ‘timeless’. And it’s hard to be timeless when you locate yourself so obviously in a single period of history. If I drop references to eBay, Facebook, McDonald’s, and any number of singers and bands – all of which I have actually done, though not in the same poem – I can’t be mistaken for a contemporary of Tennyson. I have skewered myself on the twenty-first century.
And even these examples are probably the exception rather than the rule, if you’ll forgive the slight narcissism of me using my own work as a general template. As a writer I’ll mention Facebook, but only in a comic or satirical piece; the idea of a Serious Poem about Real Issues that centres on a Wall-to-Wall is somewhat alien to me. But I can’t identify exactly why that is. Pomegranate has a Facebook group. I speak to most of my friends and acquaintances – the people, in other words, who feed directly into my poetry, whether I’m aware of it or not – on Facebook. I use it pretty much every day; like the car and the microwave, I have absorbed it into the fabric of my daily life. And if it’s how I communicate, why shouldn’t I base a poem around it?
Partly because it feels – well, a little stupid. Typing a sentence like ‘some of the most important conversations of your life can be had on the Internet’ makes me want to laugh out loud, even though I know it to be true. We’ve never had problems with talking-at-a-distance in poetry before; in fact some of the key love stories in our language deal with the vagaries of sending letters, despite these being slower, more stilted and arguably less like a real conversation than say, a chat over MSN. Poetry tends to formalise, however, and it could be the very transience, the very everydayness of a messenger window that puts even those of us who are constantly connected on guard against its use in capital-letter Art. Letters are ritualised, constructed, saved, kept. The lines I dash off over Hotmail aren’t – and as such, they probably capture the modern experience a damn sight better. But we fear them.
Likewise slang; it is rare that a poem published can capture the way we are talking right now. Words I use or hear used in daily life, I’d never use in poetry – ‘well good’ being a notable example. Is it about self-image? Is it a mistrust of ephemera, a worry that nothing dates faster than the language of the hip? Or does it simply not feel right, judged against our puffed-up notions of what poems look and sound like, even as we claim not to have such preconceptions? Deep down, there’s literature’s latent scoff: Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t work if they’d had texting. ‘Sorry Friar Lawrence, I got SARS and then the signal went’. But like it or not, these technologies are here to stay, and like everything else, poetry must find a place for them. If it doesn’t want to be left behind, it needs somehow to assimilate the modern world, while eschewing crassness, product placement and vulgar Zeitgeist-surfing. Modernism with a lower-case ‘m’. Right here. Right now. How does that sound to you? (Tb luv Rich xx)
Richard O'Brien
Richard O’Brien is one of Pomegranate’s two submissions editors. He likes to think of himself as Charlotte Geater’s glamourless assistant.
He was born in Peterborough in 1990 and has returned only for weddings and funerals since starting at Brasenose College Oxford in 2008. He has also returned for holidays.
His first pamphlet, ‘your own devices’, was published by tall-lighthouse press in 2009, and his first play ‘Instead of Beauty’ was the winner of the 2010 OUDS New Writing Festival. He enjoys the humiliation of directing autobiographical musicals. Other interests include travel, museums, travelling to museums, and walks on a long beach.