A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
and journalist Jeremy Paxman was appointed as one of the judges for the Forward Prize in 2014. The appointment was not controversial in itself. Instead, comments made by Paxman during the judging process raised a series of objections from a number of poets on social media. Poetry, Paxman argued, had “connived at its own irrelevance”; poets were only interested in speaking to “other poets” and reluctant to engage with “ordinary people.” What was needed, the presenter suggested, was an “inquisition” where poets would account for the creative and technical decisions they had undertaken while writing their work (Flood 2014). Certain reports of Paxman's speech also featured statistics from the online sales analysis service Nielsen BookScan, which depicted a decline in the sales of poetry publications, from £8.4 million in 2009 to £7.8 million in 2013 (Flood 2014). Moreover, as these statistics encapsulated the overall sales of poetry in UK‐based bookshops, the readership for contemporary poetry was potentially even smaller than these figures indicate: an Arts Council report on the state of poetry in 2000 concluded that only around 3% of collections sold were written by contemporary writers, and some 67% of this already small percentage pertained to books by a single author (Bridgewood and Hampson 2000, 1). In light of these statistics, one might conclude that Paxman's comments were not entirely unfounded. And yet, in 2012, the poet and critic Robert Sheppard noted that innovative British and Irish poetry was “living through a golden age” (Loydell and Sheppard 2012). A year earlier, Andrew Duncan claimed that the quality of poetry emerging from centers such as London was reaching “a historic peak” (Duncan 2011).
As these figures and observations are all relatively contemporaneous with each other, they pose a conundrum: how can an art form experience a golden age or a historic peak and simultaneously connive at its own irrelevance? Who reads modern poetry? In this chapter, I will endeavor to propose possible answers to these problematic questions. First, I will provide a very brief overview of how these issues have developed from the 1960s to the present day; second, I will outline how these debates are addressed in current scholarship; and, finally, I will suggest some further developments that could contribute toward offering a more comprehensive representation of the readership for modern British and Irish poetry.
In some respects, the objections and controversy around Paxman's comments are surprising, as his sentiments are hardly novel. In 1964, Adrian Mitchell opened his first collection, Poems, with an epigraph where he argued that “[m]ost people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people” (Mitchell 1964, n.p.). Here, the underlying claim poses a similar conception of poetry as an elitist praxis that is only interested in communicating with a coterie of like‐minded practitioners, which consequently disregards a considerable proportion of the general public. However, Mitchell's repetition of “most” is notable, as it relates this issue of coteries to questions of class. The poetry that ignores most people was—in Mitchell's view at the time—written predominately by “male, middle‐class, and university‐educated poets,” whose intellectualism and academicism ultimately alienated the wider public (Mitchell n.d.).
Although these social characteristics apply equally to both high modernists such as Pound and Eliot and the Movement poets of the 1950s, it is curious that the latter group generally receives greater public acknowledgment than the more experimental works of poets belonging to what some have called “the parallel tradition” (Edwards 2000, 34). Indeed, the Movement's poetics cohere well with a common understanding of what poetry is: empirical statements “about the non‐verbal external world” (Forrest‐Thompson 1978, xi), related through narratively and syntactically coherent, pristine, and closed verses.1 For instance, in reading Larkin's “As Bad as a Mile,” we can—with relative ease—visualize the scene where the apple core misses the basket, and understand the situation as a humorous representation of everyday failures (Larkin 1964, 32). In other words, the poem appears to be accessible, and its accessibility relies on a deliberate limitation of its poetic interactions.2 However, if we examine a poem such as J. H. Prynne's “The Glacial Question, Unsolved,” we are met with a complex mapping of geographical and geological questions that draw upon a series of scholarly references (Prynne 2005, 65–67). In order to understand the poem, we might have to track down Prynne's resources, and work out their implications within the text; at the very least, the poem requires multiple readings. These challenges are a pleasure, but the pleasure they provide differs greatly from the experience of reading Larkin's poem. As such, poems where the syntactical elements draw upon “notions of discontinuity and indeterminacy” (Sheppard 2005, 3)—or where the poet deploys complex, specialist vocabulary and concepts from scientific or philosophical discourses, as Prynne does—are frequently regarded as inaccessible, overtly academic, and intellectually elitist.
As reductive as these binary oppositions inevitably are, the history of modern British and Irish poetry offers many examples of such acrimonious factionalisms in terms of its audience. During Eric Mottram's editorship of Poetry Review in the 1970s, the editor's commitment to experimental work provoked “puzzlement, outrage, and eventual rejection” (Barry 2006, 152) among the magazine's readers.3 The middle‐class, suburban subscribers felt alienated by the apparent difficulty and the profanities of these poems, and dismissed them as dull pieces of infantilism (Barry 2006, 153–154). In other cases, poets themselves have seemingly fetishized the lack of wider readership. Iain Sinclair, for instance, makes frequent references to poetry belonging in exile among ephemeral publications that are difficult to obtain without a “team of private detectives” (Sinclair 1996, xiv). To elaborate, these statements represent a poetic sociality that is mistrustful of a public taste for easy pleasure, and instead regards fellow practitioners as a more receptive audience. While certain recent scholarly works and anthologies have sought to problematize the dichotomous taxonomies of the “mainstream” and the “avant‐garde,” the present panorama still relies upon these cultural stereotypes.4 The accessible, more widely read poems are deemed to soothe, console, and pacify “our sharpest experiences of grief and loss and bewilderment” (Goode 2011, iii), while more experimental works go unread because they are seen as acts of self‐absorbed obscurantism that disparages readers who are unable to understand it.5
Despite this brief overview, a clear narrative begins to emerge. Although the audiences of modern poetry as a whole are significantly smaller than those of novels or films, the internal divisions within this readership limit its public presence even further. While some “mainstream” poets may enjoy comparatively wider acclaim, the readers of experimental poems are supposedly limited to other poets, academics, and university students. A huge swathe of British and Irish poetry is in other words deemed too difficult for reading.
However, I think the assumptions of such narratives should be contested, and recent critical works offer some valuable alternatives to these conceptions of modern readership. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that modern artworks that seem incomprehensible appear as such because they transgress the common practices of (cultural) capitalism. Consequently, the most prominent detractors of these artworks reject them simply on the bases of crude assumptions. As he elaborates on this suggestion, Adorno offers a useful characterization that is applicable to the perceived notions of inaccessibility in modern poetry:
The non‐specialist will no more understand the most recent developments in nuclear physics than the lay person will straightaway grasp extremely complex [modern art]. Whereas, however, the incomprehensibility of physics is accepted […] modern art's incomprehensibility is branded as schizoid arbitrariness, even though [it] gives way to experience no less than does the scientifically obscure.
(Adorno 2013, 320)
This argument is quite similar to Robert Sheppard's view that no poem is more accessible than any other “since all poems are social facts open to social comprehension” and completion (Sheppard 2005, 7). In other words, Sheppard regards poetry as an unfinished task that requires a committed readerly