Tempest fugit

The performance poet Kate Tempest is widely admired.  The Huffington Post describes her as "Britain's leading young poet, playwright and rapper . . . one of the most widely respected performers in the country – the complete package of lyrics and delivery."

In a recent interview she insisted that poetry should be more about the audience than the performer. “That’s an opinion that ruffles a lot of feathers because poets have got quite high opinions of themselves in certain circles,” she said. 

I'm not at all sure what those 'certain circles' might be, unless the Sitwells are still at it somewhere. I really cannot imagine whose feathers are ruffled, in her quaint phrase, and why. Since the so-called Poetry Wars of the 1970s - described half a century ago as 'a knife-fight in a phone booth' - Tempest's side has pretty much won, by which I mean the kind of audeince-friendly performance poetry popularised fifty years ago by the Liverpudlians Roger McGough, Brian Patten et al has more or less displaced the kind of poetry written by the type of poets  to which I suppose Tempest must be referring - quiet, private, personal and technically accomplished. It's still circulating among a small audience of appreciative readers who value that sort of thing, but let's agree that serious poetry no longer enjoys cultural pre-eminence, and does not have much popular appeal. (I realise that even using such a loaded phrase as 'real poetry' puts me beyond the pall, but if you're still reading this you'll know what I mean, and perhaps even agree with me. And you'll know what I mean by 'popular appeal'.) There is still plenty of real poetry around, written by real poets, many of whom I've featured in this blog - J. O. Morgan, Alice Oswald, Nancy Campbell, many others).

When it comes to poetry I feel, as a reader, like rather the character played by Isabelle Huppert in Hal Harley's wonderful movie Amateur.  Asked how she can be (as she claims) a 'nymphomaniac virgin' she replies briskly: "I'm choosy'.)

I'm choosy.

Tempest, born in 1985, can be forgiven for not knowing about the radical democratisation of the arts set in train after the Second World War and I assume that's why she thinks the battle has just begun. In this, to be sure, she is like any ambitious young artist making their way in the world - the established order must be challenged, and overthrown, to make room for the new. An interest in one's predecessors is a secondary consideration. The problem is that the established order she should be seeking to overthrow consists entirely of poets very like herself - public performers of crowd-pleasing tub-thumping stuff. Apart from her rapper tendencies her work seems to me very similar to those Liverpool Poets of the 1950s. Like today's rock bands doing cover versions of Beatles songs with state-of-the-art lighting rigs and sound systems. 

I don't much admire her writing or her delivery of it - it doesn't speak to me (how could it?) but when she makes disparaging generalisations about poetry I feel obliged to pick up my racket and slice back. And I think she needs to consider, at thirty, how long she can sustain her current schtick.

It's important for Tempest to believe in what she sees as her iconoclastic role - storming the ivory towers, showing by example that (hey-ho) 'poetry is for everyone'. She continues:

“Intellectual snobbery is rife in lots of artforms. What’s exciting about performance is it takes it back to an ancient time when it wasn’t about how clever, important or educated you were. It was about how well you could communicate.”

When was that 'ancient time'? The ability to communicate well clearly suggests intelligence and in all likelihood an education, or its pre-historic equivalent. Tempest (herself intelligent and educated and untroubled by doubts about her own importance) imagines some hypothetical past in which naturally gifted poets would strum their lyres and swoon at the sight of a meadow. These poets presumably had a high opinion of themselves but it took the arrival of Kate Tempest to ruffle their feathers.

It's not about how clever or important or educated you are. It's about how good you are at what you do. Tempest is good at what she does but has an essentially philistine view of culture in general and of poetry in particular - crudely put, that it's really for toffs.  If that's the case how come she enjoys such acclaim and success and commands such large whooping audiences? Why doesn't J. H. Prynne do Glastonbury?

It's not snobbish to dislike or be indifferent to Kate Tempest's performance poetry (although no doubt there are those who have snobbish reasons for doing so). It's perfectly reasonable to dislike her work on aesthetic grounds. A waspish (and very funny) critique of Tempest's performance was written by Lloyd Evans for The Spectator (8 October 2016):

Every line sounds like its predecessor, half sung on a falling note, and every word seems to exult in its contact with the dolorous and moribund.

Here are some representative Tempest lines from her Brand New Ancients:

That face on the street you walk past without looking at,
or that face on the street that walks past you without looking back
or the man in the supermarket trying to keep his kids out of
his trolley,
or the woman by the postbox fighting with her brolly,
every single person has a purpose in them burning.
Look again, and allow yourself to see them.

© Kate Tempest

These lines are flat on the page but may (let's agree) become fierce and persuasive when performed - but that's what makes them lyrics rather than poetry. They do not reveal anything on subsequent readings - and how could they? Ian Hamilton foresaw this kind of writing in the late 1970s when, writing in Poetry Review he said:

What we see today is more what poetry is not than what it is . . . . Every line doesn't count, every word hasn't been carefully chosen, it doesn't have any structure, there's no reason why this line is broken and that line is not […] You call this poetry? I think it's something, but I don't think it's poetry.

He was choosy.

Tempest's talent is difficult to separate from her confident sense of entitlement (both of which are admirable, I think, and a strong sense of entitlement is essential for all writers). But in the end it is talent that counts, not clamour and certainly not sincerity. And also ideas, of course - but there's a difference between ideas and good ideas. She seems unsure of the difference between loquacity and eloquence and the result, as poetry or simply as writing, is torrential but inconsequential.

There's also the hoary old distinction to be made between classicism and romanticism, two terms best understood in opposition. Classicism in poetry is against emotional excess (though not against emotion); it values reason, control and precision. It is determined to exercise reason. The classical temperament has no time for sentimentality. There's little place for it in our world, in these times.

In The New Book of Snobs (published last month) D. J. Taylor notes that in our relativist era accusations of snobbishness are routinely levelled by some as 'a scapegoat for their own inability to formulate or accept a judgement'. Discriminating taste based on a belief in objective aesthetic standards supporting an informed opinion is often resented and condemned and he cites the journalist and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter, whose definition of a snob seems to be anyone who disagrees with Janet Street-Porter.

Not for the first time I'd argue that poetry - even Kate Tempest's version of poetry its with lashings of candour and (literal) chest-beating - is not for everyone. It's for anyone.

The Hatred of Poetry

I've been skimming through the American poet Ben Lerner's recent long essay The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Press).

Her gets off to a wobbly start on the first page:

In ninth grade English Mrs. X required us to memorise and recite a poem, so I went and asked the Topeka High librarian to direct me to the shortest poem she knew and she suggested Marianne Moore's "Poetry," [punctuation sic] which, in the 1967 version, reads in its entirety:

          I, too, dislike it.
             Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
             it, after all, a place for the genuine.

The Topeka High librarian might have gone one better and recommended Arem Saroyan's one-word poem 'lighght' (about which you can read more in a very good piece by Ian Daly here).

But back to Marianne Moore: in what is regarded by some as the worst case of poetic revision in literary history, the poet reduced a far longer work to these three lines in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), the volume in which this version first appeared to the dismay of many of her admirers. She spent half a century worrying away at the poem and many variant drafts exist, some of them published, others not. The version below (which is pretty much accepted as the standard full-length 'Poetry') culminates in her justly-famous definition of poetry as 'an imaginary garden with real toads in it', a phrase she may have placed in inverted commas to suggest an attribution to some other poet, although there's every reason to suppose these are her own words.

Here is Moore's 'Poetry' in full, which I'm sure you'll enjoy. Then we'll get back to Lerner.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be “literalists of the imagination”--above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.

© The Estate of Marianne Moore

Lerner has presumably read a lot of poetry but in assembling his case cites a narrow range of mostly American authors - Whitman, Moore, Lowell and a handful of others unknown to me. There's no room here for the big guns - Yeats and Auden and Eliot do not feature at all, Pound barely. Apart from passing references to Rimbaud and Cocteau all the quotations are from Anglophone poets and the author's choice of contemporary American writers is dispiriting:  Cyrus Console, Claudia Rankine and the hateful anti-Semitic New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka, now deceased.  

Lerner writes amusingly on the peculiar mystique that surrounds and adheres to the idea of being a published poet, at least in the public imagination. To be a published poet is, in the popular view, to have a firm purchase on immortality denied to the rest of humanity (but try telling that to the shade of Coventry Patmore). There is, Lerner says, a bafflingly persistent association between poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population.

He's quite wrong about that, I think. Poetry and fame are associated because, as far as that general population is concerned, the only poets they are likely to be able to name are the kind who crop up on the telly - Pam Ayres, say (at least in Britain). And to be on the telly is to be famous, QED. That 'being a poet' (whatever that means) implies a more direct and fruitful engagement with 'life' is another stubbornly enduring myth. As Lerner puts it, the loss of interest in poetry after school or college 'chafes against the early association of poetry and self', as if the non-poet is by definition existentially underachieving and incapable of fulfilling his or her full potential as a human being. The idea of poetry as a form of self-expression is an idea that no amount of argument or evidence will dismantle. It is that, of course, but it's more than that.

Is it not the case that, in our hyper-commodified late capitalist culture, poetry - real poetry, not the stuff that happens noisily in festival tents to whooping audiences - is marginalised because it cannot be monetized and commodified, because it is personal, private (up to a point) and quiet? Also because any given majority will always regard any given minority (when it comes to a taste for something 'unpopular') as a self-conscious, self-electing and self-regarding elite.

Lerner claims that 'actual poems are structurally foredoomed by a "bitter logic" that cannot be overcome by any level of virtuosity. Poetry isn't hard, he admits; it's impossible'. What kind of art, Lerner asks, assumes the dislike of its audience, and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it?

Any kind of art, surely? Any, that is, not aimed cynically or opportunistically at low common denominators. Real artists do whatever it is they do because they have no choice in the matter. They write for themselves, not for others. If what they write attracts a readership that's something; if a large readership that's something else again. But Cyril Connolly was surely on the money when he said: "Write for yourself and have no audience; write for an audience and have no self'.

Lerner considers at inordinate length William McGonagall's Tay Bridge Disaster. He is an attentive close reader but seems to me entirely to miss the point of McGonagall (which is largely that McGonagall is pointless). It is a bold claim to assert that a greater understanding of an art form can come from the painstaking study of its worst examples - would we appreciate Rembrandt more or less after exposure to Thomas Kincaid? Lerner's view that poetry is bound to fail because it can never reach a hypothetical (and presumably desirable) state of perfection is hardly worth investigating; poetry is a process, surely - not a product. 

As somebody who reads quite a lot of contemporary poetry, I'll admit that there are poets (and poems) I very much dislike, although hatred might  not be the right word. Some I admire, some I ignore. The ones I dislike I don't read. 

Back in the 1970s, at the height of the so-called Poetry Wars (lofty establishment versus rowdy upstarts, as always) somebody compared the dispute to "a kite-fight in a phone booth" which captures perfectly both the viciousness, the intimacy and - as in most literary disputes - the low stakes. Why that degree of intensity, of animosity? Perhaps because poetry is something about which we all feel obliged and entitled  to have an opinion.  

Lerner's essay is not, as I lazily assumed before reading it, a philistine assault on cultural shibboleths - it's something far more considered, thoughtful and reflective. I was more than once reminded of Flaubert's lines (attributed to Prudhomme) about spinach: 

 Je ne les aime pas, j’en suis bien aise, car si je les aimais, j’en mangerais, et je ne puis pas les souffrir.

       (I don't like it, and I'm glad I don't like it, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I can't stand it,)

Anakana Schofield's Martin John

Marco Roth (writing in the Brooklyn-based journal n+1) came up with the useful term 'neuronovel' for fictions that explore the experience of what he calls 'a cognitively anomalous or abnormal person'. 

He traces the neuronovel's origins only as far back as Ian McEwan's Everlasting Love (1997) and also cites Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which the main character is a boy with an autistic spectrum disorder; McEwan again in Saturday (Huntington's disease) and many genre novels which feature, for instance, amnesia and bipolar disorders. 

What these very different novels share is an interest in the workings of the brain rather than of the mind, an interest that reflects, claims Roth, a post-Freudian, post-Lacanian movement away from traditional theories of personality. The neuronovel explores the loss of self, although selfhood - no longer the prerogative of novelists - has become the property of specialists working within their own professional disciplines. But human consciousness is too complex a subject to be monopolised by scientists and philosophers. We need artists, and literature offers a large cohort of pre-McEwan characters with cognitive disorders pre-dating Everlasting Love, from Don Quixote to Captain Ahab and from Hieronymo in The Spanish Tragedy to Hannibal Lecter. 

Alex Pheby, in his brilliant novel Playthings (Galley Beggar Press), vividly portrays how it must be to lose any sense of selfhood, evoking the terrible dilemma of Judge Paul Schreber, a rational and respectable  pillar of the establishment reduced to the status of a poor, bare, forked animal. Schreber's psychotic madness, interrupted  by occasional bouts of eloquent lucidity, when he speaks with dignity and authority, add to the nightmare. There is no chance that he will ever be allowed home.

A more recent novel is Martin John by Anakana Schofield, an Irish writer based in Canada. This was recently shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize (which went to Mike McCormack's Solar Bones) and is also in the running for the first Republic of Consciousness Prize. The eponymous male character is an Irishman living in London. He has a lavish repertoire of behavioural disorders including a dislike of words that start with 'P', a paradoxical appetite for pork pies, an obsession with news media and the Eurovision Song Contest, persecution mania, obsessive compulsive traits, a reluctance to urinate (he prefers the discomfort of a painfully full bladder) and so on. Most troublingly he is a sexual pervert who lunges at women (and not only women), exposes himself and - how to put this? - enjoys public acts of self-pollution. He is not a likeable man.

But this is a likeable book. No, not likeable exactly - it''s startlingly original, stylistically innovative, bracingly erratic and absolutely unforgettable. The author offers a written correlative to Martin John's bizarre character through a prose style reliant on repetition and redundancy and a simple, deliberately impoverished vocabulary. She expresses his multiple disorders with clarity, precision, insight and sympathetic understanding. Martin John's mother is absolutely terrifying - in denial about her only son's nature, fearful and manipulative and at least partly to blame. Martin John himself is unknowable (especially to himself) and Schofield's narrative remains detached yet in step with his spiralling insanity. She knows just how much to reveal, and when, and how.

Martin John is  essential reading. Comparisons with Beckett are inevitable (and admirers of Murphy will leap on Schofield's book with a glad cry). But Maritn John doesn't need that kind of boost - it's a fully-realised and wonderfully unpleasant investigation into what it means to be inhuman.

Order a copy from the publishers And Other Stories.

Other people are, to a greater or lesser extent equally unknowable, even from the outside. Some we don't want to know. What runs through Trump's mind when he sees other people, most of whom are likely to be his intellectual superiors? (Not at his rallies, of course). What is it like to be him all the time? Getting dressed, arranging his hairs, choosing a tie, applying the slap?

Sapir-Whorf in Hollywood

It was slightly shocking to hear an off-hand reference to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Arrival, directed by Canadian Denis Villeneuve, is a thoughtful and blissfully slow-paced movie. Villeneuve's script is adapted from Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. Tarkovsky for beginners.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, aka Linguistic Relativity, holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition, or world view. The German linguists Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) suggested that grammatical differences reflect differences in the way that language users perceive the world.  Chomsky (never far from any serious discussion about language) was the most eminent of the academics and theorists who advanced the view that human language and human cognition is universal. It is, as I say, slightly shocking to discover that the hypothesis forms the basis for much of a mainstream film's plot.

Arrival stars Amy Adams (very good indeed) as an academic linguist and polyglot (Farsi, Mandarin) enlisted by the US military when a colossal spacecraft (one of 12 worldwide) fetches up in rural Montana. They need somebody to translate the weird creaking noises that appear to constitute their spoken language. This she does, and within a very short time has an implausible fluency in the written form (which looks like the rings left by coffee mugs on a tablecloth). I cannot imagine how, working alone, she achieves so much so soon but this ia a movie, not a documentary. The two seven-limbed aliens in the Montana vessel (officially 'Heptapods' but facetiously nicknamed Abbott and Costello) resemble expensive prosthetic versions of Kang and Kodos, the drooling tentacular creatures occasionally appearing in The Simpsons). The spacecraft are pretty good - towering basaltic slabs as mysterious and enigmatic as the monolith in 2001 - a Space Odyssey.

There are dud moments - especially the frequent and irritating cutaways to glossy talking head news presenters, invariably big-haired Americans, who bring us up to speed on global events as they emerge.  The film drags in the middle, though not catastrophically, and I paid close attention to the end.  One thing made me snort. On her  first encounter with these alien creatures our brilliant linguist deciders that the best way to communicate is by writing HUMAN in black board marker on a piece of white card (barely a step above 'Me Tarzan. You Jane'). As she has the marker pen and white card with her this is clearly premeditated, so why not prep the card in advance?  Writing in capitalised English is every bit as crude and dumb as shouting slowly at foreigners (a once-commonplace English trait). Why did she not assemble a series of pictograms? Why did her nerdy colleague, the brilliant maths guy, not have some universal equations to hand? Why not try music? Or Urdu? Or (to borrow Kurt Vonnegut's lovely idea) farting and tap-dancing? 

I haven't done justice to the beautifully modulated atmosphere of loss and yearning. Adams's character is the grieving mother of a daughter who has died from an unspecified and very rare medical condition. The actress is quite brilliant at registering the overwhelming pain of this loss, although all is not quite as it seems and there's a brilliant twist (no, not so crude a thing as a twist, but a gentle and subtle revelation) that is followed by a schmaltzy ending which prompted the couple to my right to leave before the credits. Recommended, nonetheless. And the soundtrack includes some Max Richter.

Jack Clemo revisited

‘He has rendered an industrial landscape more completely and more successfully than any English poet except possibly Auden’  said the New Statesman, of the visionary Cornish poet Jack Clemo.

The landscape is that of the china clay industry, a weird chalk-white lunar terrain of vast excavations and pyramidal slag heaps, of luminous turquoise lakes and surreal combinations of colour and contour.

I think Clemo bears comparison with Auden on several counts. Not simply Auden's love of dilapidated industrial plant (and of lead mines in particular), but their shared Christianity, and their eccentric but essentially humane view of the world.

I blogged three years ago about Jack Clemo (pronounced 'clemmo') and, while I can hardly take any responsibility for the revival of interest in his life and work since then, it's certainly wonderful to see.
Clay Phoenix: A Biography of Jack Clemo by Luke Thompson was published earlier this year followed by a Selected Poems from Enitharmon with an introduction by Rowan Williams.

Now Luke Thompson has set up Guillemot Press, an 'Independent Publisher of Pamphlets and Beautiful Books', and among the first publications is a short story by Clemo: The Clay Dump, written in 1950 but only now appearing in print. It's very short and very good indeed. Lucy Gribble, forty-year-old school caretaker lives a lonely and unfulfilled life and is subject to the constant scrutiny of her neighbours when, to make a little money, she takes in lodgers.  Blinking back the tears I was reminded of Flaubert's Un cœur simple.

© Guillemot Press

Clemo, as the publisher's note puts it, 'inherited a disease from his father' and became profoundly deaf and blind before he was forty. His personal circumstances were often wretched, but he found love and consolation quite late in life and his poetry is often magnificent.

Guillemot gets everything right. The Clay Dump is in a beautiful limited edition of 225 and, at £5, an extraordinary bargain. Order it from the publisher here.

On the Cenotaph

Today is Remembrance Sunday, with the usual solemn ceremonies at the Cenotaph in London's Whitehall attended by the usual shifty cohort of public figures and, as every year, my eyes will prick and smart when the band plays Elgar's sad and lovely Nimrod. 

I learned only recently that Lutyens' noble design for the Cenotaph has a remarkable, little-known feature - the sides are not parallel but, if extended vertically, would meet at a point 980 feet (300 m) above the ground, the place, if you like, where heaven begins. 

Edwin Lutyen's original design for the Cenotaph

Fewer folk these days wear a poppy than in the past, and they have their reasons. I wear one because I believe it's proper to commemorate and honour the war dead. But I also want to offset the ethical carbon footprint of unpleasant public figures who sport poppies without humility, grace or understanding. 

Momentary Stars

According to the American critic Ron Charles "More poems from Poets.org have been shared in the past 2 days than in any other 48-hour period in the past 4 years". Something similar happened after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 - Auden's great poem 'September 1939' circulated. You'll know this, perhaps even by heart:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade


The election of the low dishonest dickhead Trump has prompted this resort to poetry. Many readers (including myself) find poetry a consolation, if not a palliative, at times like this. It offers continuity, permanence, direct contact with an intelligent, rational and sophisticated mind (not always, but you catch my drift). I cannot imagine what poems are being circulated in response to Trump's victory, but expect they offer some kind of balance, a compensating sensibility to this sociopathic Ooompa-Loompa.  At times like this poetry is not an escape from reality but an engagement with it, both by poets and their readers.

Momentary Stars is a collection of poems by Edward Vanderpump, ranging from some precocious juvenilia from the early 1960s to the present day. It's a beautifully-produced volume with a gorgeous abstract cover (from a painting by the poet's daughter). I've occasionally come across his work before, in little magazines such as Smith's Knoll - his splendid surname makes an immediate impression.

From internal evidence I think he must have been born soon after the end of the last war, making him around seventy now. There are many consolations among the gifts received for age - family (and grandchildren in particular), cycling and cricket and tennis. Also some pin-sharp memories of listening to Blossom Dearie in a chilly Bristol flat, of the poet as small boy cautiously exploring his parents' bedroom back in the days when mothers had dressing-tables with pots of cold cream and 'boxes for earrings, maybe', of exploring unsupervised the engine room of the old Woolwich Ferry.

       Those ordinary, grubby days seem now

       impossibly free, exciting.

       If only we had realised!

Generous, thoughtful, droll and wise, this is a very satisfying collection. There are poems about cats, about Japan and Vietnam, about mulling over photograph albums and the funeral of the poet's centenarian mother. There is a sudden and dramatic change of tone on page 29 when, following a short poem about a much-loved family cat, we read 'Just Reasons', a fierce and angry re-direction:

       Executions, Terror, Exile, Torture.
       Just reasons, no excuse.

Things become darker after that - poems about Gaza,  a hair-raising cab-ride in Bharatpur, India, Libya and Colonel Gaddaffi (an ogre from another era who, one feels, is almost forgotten).

In  'A Later Train'  the view from a railway carriage of dark and illuminated apartment windows prompts this witty re-purposing of William Blake.

       Bring me my Bic of burning gold,
       bring me my ball-point of desire
       to fill the white squares and the black with names.

Momentary Stars is published by Clydesdale Jefferson Press, 38 Mill Hill Road, Norwich, NR2 3DP