A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
her mouth with my own” (l. 2). Simple, if disturbingly predatory, language overlays an iambic trot toward an inevitable consummation: “we gave ourselves up, one to the other / like prisoners over a bridge” (ll. 7–8). The poem ends with a jaunty joke: “the night we lay down on the flag of surrender / and woke on the flag of Japan” (ll. 11–12). The end rhymes of “surrender” with “tender” and “Japan” with “plan”—in the first and second lines respectively—are designed to produce a triumphant finale confirming the speaker's (and poet's) wit and ingenuity. It is an uncomfortable poem of poetic and physical domination. “Imperial” also exploits a reader's possible expectation that Paterson may have broader cultural or political points, but then undermines this hope with the bathos and irony of neat end rhymes and a crumpled flag. Paterson produces a little, well‐made poem: it is syntactically coherent, it deftly inhabits iambic meter, and is spoken from a confident (and creepy) singular perspective.
By contrast, Sheppard prefers what might be called open poems, with disruptive grammar and syntax; poems which exhibit or foreground their artifice and materiality. What Sheppard (2005, 142) later describes as “linguistically innovative poetry” also usually questions the stability of a unified speaking voice as well as subjectivity and identity. For example, Brady's (2005, 54) “Saw Fit” takes as its subject Lynndie England, a US soldier involved in the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. “Saw Fit” ventriloquizes a number of conflicting viewpoints, dramatized through the paratactic arrangement of a range of discourses:
Gitmo in legal twilight, red and green hazard
net the sea
scape beyond enduring
freedom, the nightly movie. Montage of flag,
soldier, airplane. Get more for your
money with American
express more blood from your nipples
(ll. 1–7)
There are several voices here–from advertising and politics, as well as contemporary argot—all jostling, none of which takes precedence. The artifice of the poem is foregrounded: enjambment, for example, is deliberately jarring, with single words interrupted to become phrases offering abrupt shifts of meaning. “American / express” becomes “express more blood” in a charged and brutal textual environment designed to shock. Unlike Paterson's Japanese flag, glimpses of American and British flags fracture and flex across the whole of the poem and form part of a strategically arranged montage, which the arrangement of lines reflects and which evokes the crude assemblages of tortured prisoners and props photographed by soldiers such as Lynndie England to take away as trophies. Paterson's perspective is fixed on his sexual conquest; Brady's mutates, shifts, and challenges. Brady's response to Paterson's introduction to this volume illustrates, therefore, that there are two dominant Urtext‐species in contemporary poetry, which act as framing contexts for many other species. These I shall call without apology: the orthodox and the innovative. As should be clear, Paterson favors and represents the orthodox; Brady, on the other hand, is of the innovative camp. Each flies a flag for very different poetic practices.
Species of Orthodox and Innovative Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Many of the species that Sampson (2012) outlines in her Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry can be grouped under what Sheppard refers to as poetries of the “Movement Orthodoxy.” Sampson describes, for example: “The Plain Dealers,” octogenarian poets such as Dannie Abse and Elaine Feinstein who “use familiar, lived‐in language” (13); “The Dandies,” poets of plain speak but who have a little more “linguistic fancy dress” (36), as she puts it; and “The Oxford Elegists,” poets such as Andrew Motion and John Fuller who produce a tone of high culture as well as an emotional register of “truth, decency and restraint” (58). Sampson's list of “Movement orthodoxies” is completed with “The new formalists” who write poetry, so she argues, which is “almost [the] complete opposite of today's widely published poetry of inertia.” Sampson's term, “inertia,” describes a kind of “notebook” poetry written by poets who “don't accept that making a poem involves transformational effort” (227). As a reaction to the abundance of such poetry, Sampson argues, “today, exploring and reviving strict form, Ciaran Carson, Mimi Khalvati and Don Paterson are leading the new formalism” (228). The new formalism uses traditional poetic meter as part of what appears to be a reactionary poetic practice and which results in poems such as “Imperial.”
Related to Sampson's designation of “notebook” poetry, as well as the type of light, metrical and rhyming verse often produced by progenitors of species in the “Movement Orthodoxy” is a pervasive form of contemporary light verse. A good deal of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry (our current Poet Laureate) falls into this category. Hence, the opening of Duffy's poem, “Prayer” (Paterson and Simic 2004, 51):
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
(ll. 1–4)
The “sudden gift” of the metaphor at the end of the stanza offers a little, darkening twist for a reader, but the rest of the poem relies on its unassuming language and its simple, poignant scene to evoke a reader's sympathy. As Wheatley (2015, 88) has observed, there is only a little skip from poems like “Prayer” to “poetry of light entertainment in the tradition of [John] Betjeman and Pam Ayers.” Paterson's description of the poetry market in his introduction to New British Poetry illustrates his alignment of “Mainstream” verse with the values of market capitalism, namely: products should be easily accessible and consumable and the quantity of their consumption determines their value. In The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson (1983, 93) notes how once dominant genres, “along with so many other institutions and traditional practices, fall […] casualty to the gradual penetration of the market system and money economy.” As a consequence, poetries courting simplicity and ease and evoking ideologies of common feeling are liable to be easily reified into products. This, in turn, often makes them indistinguishable from species of light verse: they frequently use the same formal devices and register as what might be called “ad‐verse,” that type of whimsical poetry used in adverts to sell fast food.
While Sampson draws on an admirably wide field of poetic practice in her book, innovative poets are under‐represented. However, her category of the “Exploded Lyric” does try to account for types of poetry which, Sampson argues, is characterized by “an implicit, and sometimes an explicit, critique of most mainstream poetics” (258). Sampson's descriptions of the poetry published by presses such as Equipage, Reality Street, and Shearsman resemble Paterson's in that she views it as reactive and negative. Sampson and Paterson do not see the point in this poetry. Indeed, this may be because their conception of poetry's function is contrary to the aims of those poets they seek to marginalize. While Sampson and Paterson seem to advocate safe, transparent, and unchallenging poetries, much of the work they either ignore or denigrate is motivated by the aim to fold into its formal practices a critique of contemporary poetics as well as social and political conditions. Such critique results in the kind of poetry Sinclair advocates and describes in the preceding text. As Redell Olsen (2007, 43) suggests of orthodox verse, “lyric sensibilities and commitment to normative syntax do not allow for the kind of radical questioning of the limits of representation itself which are key features” of linguistically innovative or experimental artworks. Poets writing innovative poetry very often have, as Olsen goes on to argue, “different priorities than those of the dominant market forces.” In other words, they resist the reification of their artworks into easily consumable commodities.
Sampson registers this resistance as a constituent part of innovative poetry when she observes that it might be considered as “practice, [and] one whose poetics may exist more in the process than the product” (271—emphasis in the