The Triumph of Literary Politics Over Honest Criticism

You read an article, and it feels wrong. Why? The central idea is too simple, the causes given too few; a certain narrowness about the presentation. Engineers talk about engineering, poets about poetry. But can these subjects be explained just on their own terms? Does the Clifton Suspension Bridge exist only because an engineer made it?

There is one great idea in William Oxley’s Horizon article – some of Arts Council funding should be used to subsidize shelf space for small press poetry in bookshops. The rest? Something is not quite right. Let’s have a look, to see what that might be.

Can it all be so simple? The creative writing bureaucracies killing poetry with soft strokes and feather boas? Reading William Oxley’s article on the state of current poetry in the Horizon Review I was left with the impression of something missing, of a big hole carefully camouflaged.

Is it really the creative writing courses that are killing the public’s interest in poetry? Like all big arresting propositions it has some initial plausibility, but then come the doubts: what is the public? What was poetry’s impact in the past? What makes a good poem? The Public, the Past, Value… like all abstractions so vast in implication, that we quite naturally interpret them to our own liking. Is it possible to make them more concrete?

Let’s try: was poetry ever popular outside the academy? The answer is easy: yes it was, the evidence of diaries, of writer’s themselves, and of journals all show that there was a ready audience for poetry. But what was this audience – the whole population? Unlikely. It was an educated public, a relatively small number of the aristocracy and a small middle class. The majority of the population had other entertainments. This is still true today. The middle class has expanded, but not so the idea of a cultivated one, as in the 19th century sense. The middle classes still go to university, but the nature of that education has changed, as has the entertainments on offer. Once, status was mixed up with culture: above a certain social level you had to be seen to be cultured; though this was mostly a veneer (though important nevertheless). Now it is perfectly acceptable to be middle class and like football and Bernard Manning; providing you treat the latter with irony, of course. This is a significant change, but it means that mainstream media no longer has to cater for art and culture in the old way – where it is provided today it is mostly repackaged into mass entertainment. Compare the old BBC:

‘That’s the great thing about television: it’s one of the fibres that holds the country together. It collapses class distinctions and helps create a sense of national identity…

‘News, entertainment, comedy documentary and classical drama in equal measure…’

With today’s product.

In his novel Jonathan Coe also shows why this worldview would soon disappear:

With his gentle, melodious voice and greying bushes of hair he was beginning to look and sound, to Hilary, like the worst sort of parish priest. ‘And it’s all in the hands of people like you. Talented youngsters whose task in the years to come will be to carry the tradition forward.’ 

The idea of an integrated culture, that is part of mainstream society, and which includes informed interest in the arts has almost disappeared – serious comment and participation is reduced to the margins and the universities. We see this across the board: think of any art, of political discussion, intellectual ideas… Within such a culture sophisticated poetry would only have appealed to the few, but the opportunities to experience it would have been available to all. As Alan Beamish in Coe’s novel says about It’s a Knockout:

This isn’t my sort of show at all… But I don’t look down on it. You have to make things which appeal to everyone.Everyone’s entitled to their bit of fun.’ (my italics)

In my case if it wasn’t for the old BBC it is doubtful I would have ever got interested in the arts.

To get those giant abstractions down on their knees we must also look at the university. A good piece by Keith Thomas in the TLS (07/05/2010) tackles this directly – What are the universities for?  In the Middle Ages it was to serve the interests of the ruling powers – the church and the state. And today? To serve the interests of power – the state and the corporation. In his piece, which is wide and rich, he reflects on how the genteel culture of letters has been subsumed into the university: the reading public of the 18th and 19th centuries are the academics of the 21st.

Of course, when the university takes charge it will shape the content and nature of its subject. We see this most clearly in art – is Conceptual Art thinkable without the academy? Universities are teaching and research institutes, their purpose and their techniques will therefore seep into the arts themselves, creating the values, determining the canon, setting the subject matter. Graeme Richardson reviewing Stephen Burt’s Close Calls With Nonsense in the TLS (23/04/2010) gives an example of the effect on poetry:

Burt likes “elliptical poetry; he likes “hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded back-story”. But who crosses the street for a hint? Whose day is made with a pun? Who gets seduced by a never-quite-unfolded back-story? Academics, that’s who.

Interestingly, Marjorie Perloff’s response (letters 07/05/2010) elides this point, and confirms his overall argument: “the campus is where it’s happening.”

William Oxley quotes George Santayana about bureaucracy. And it is true the nature of bureaucracy creates its own universe. With the old idea of an integrated culture, and an educated and cultivated middle class, there was the potential for wide and deep learning across a wide range of people. Thomas reminds us that in the 18th and 19th centuries “Gibbon, Macaulay, Faraday and Darwin did not work in the universities.” In 1950’s and 1960’s America this still appeared the case in poetry:

To be an American avant-gardist poet at that moment, one had to know a lot about something, and a little about everything else…. In the 1970’s, the life of the poet in American society radically changed…. universities… began teaching contemporary poetry and offering courses and advanced degrees in something called “creative writing”…. Poetry, almost overnight, became a respectable middle-class career. (Eliot Weinberger)

However, one danger of treating literature or art as a degree subject is the specialisation and narrowness of university departments is reflected in the study of the subject itself. And if trends continue towards specialisation (inevitable as the number of poets, writers and artists increase?), so people maybe be reduced to studying in depth not only just poetry, but a limited number of poets. Yet as Eliot Weinberger writes, the glory of mid century American poetry was the range of interests and knowledge of its practitioners. Also their obsession. Are office workers so keen on their work?

In the past, the exigencies of earning a living had discouraged all but the most committed (or more exactly, obsessed) and those who held on were nevertheless forced out into the world as workers, journalists, capitalists, bohemians – all of which, in turn nourished the poetry.

This is a wonderful description of how Keith Thomas’ Victorian Man of Letters was translated into 20th century America. Weinberger makes the point very clearly: great poetry is almost certainly a minority interest. With the occasional great poem or poet becoming public property; Pasternak in the Soviet Union? In his anthology the radical poets were against the grain of American society, and this is part of their strength. Weinberger again:

In a society where all poets are outsiders, most of the poets here are, or have been, outside the outside.

For Oxley the current creative writing system prevents criticism, and thus prevents the creation of good poetry: everybody is too nice to each other (though one has to be careful: between the mainstream and the avant-garde there is an ongoing Cold War). The solution? Oxley wants to make poetry popular, and for it to be open to public criticism:

…one doesn’t need to be a plumber to know when a tap is not working…. Ergo, one does not need to be a poet to know when a poem is rubbish or… when a poem is of good quality.

Well, there is popular poetry: Pam Ayres. On shop bookshelves she has more space than WB Yeats. However, this is poetry in its narrowest sense. If you think more widely - nearly everybody in the UK listens to lyric poetry: pop music. Should we reduce all poetry to this? And criticism to the comments on the guardian’s comment is free site? A strange argument, which contradicts his belief in the need

For poetry that appeals to all the other human concerns one must resort to today’s more serious poets of greater breadth or concern

Behind this argument is the assumption of equality. Another wonderful abstraction! The nature of industrial society is egalitarian: in order to manage the ever-changing economy people have to be interchangeable machine cogs or microchips. We have to be human units! This requirement has had profound effects on our ideas and attitudes; it has resulted in calls for equality in other areas. On the whole this good: we should all have equal rights, equal access to education and health care. However, does it follow that we should be equal in all aspects? Should I be a Nuclear Physicist when I know nothing about physics and have no aptitude for it? The question answers itself. Likewise with so much of our society; and also with the arts. However, because writing appears so easy, and because the growth of the Creative Writing courses, like the university industry itself, encourages more and more people to be students, and write and perform, this elementary truth is overlooked. This in part explains Oxley’s argument about the fluffiness of the response to so much published poetry – without the encouragement, a form of credit, of futures in the literary field – the industry would collapse: not only the departments but the small press publishing that goes with it. However, it is the university where well-informed critics are most likely to live – they have the time and the resources, and they participate in an engaged community. You don’t have to be an academic to voice intelligent criticism of the arts. But you do need to be informed, and to be at least moderately well read. Today these attributes of our culture are rarer outside the academy.

Is there an answer? Only Weinberger’s:

I take American poetry to be, with French and Spanish (as written in the Old and New Worlds), one of the great poetries of the century. This is not a matter of national pride: American poetry has always been written in spite of, not because of, the culture it inhabits. With rare exceptions, it has remained an underground activity. Few poets have been considered as actively contributing to the intellectual life of the country; few, in their lifetimes, are well known, even among people who read books.

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