A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
Hamilton (2013, 17) remarks that, “The Editor had the idea that some new terms were needed.” While he does not acknowledge Sampson as a source of his “new terms,” he continues (using her exact terms): “So, let's say there are two general modes of U.K. and U.S. poetry: ‘Product’ and ‘Process’.” After a lengthy paragraph outlining the distinctions between the two types of poetry (which mirror those I have suggested between orthodox and innovative), Hamilton gets impatient:
But “Product” and “Process” represent the modern creep of business and corporate language and ideology into all areas of thought and work – dismiss them from your mind entirely.
(18)
Hamilton's intervention in his own argument captures the spirit and anxieties of many of the poets and poems represented in his volume. Classification and the use of “corporate” terms freighted with the ideology of the marketplace are to be avoided and outflanked wherever they are detected. And, like Bergvall's poem which begins this chapter, many of the poems Hamilton collects resist ease of classification, consumption, and interpretation. Hence, Hamilton publishes a sequence of poems called “Who Not to Speak To” by Marianne Morris, which offers visually arresting commentaries, interventions, musings, and reflections on contemporary culture and politics as well as on the act of writing itself (I quote from Morris's original publication):
SUCH PASSIONS ABOUND
in the CYPBERSPHERE!
On the Have Your Say website,
Pitt‐Palin Pacified Rice Thatcher's
face is embroiled in a botox debate
about one hundred and sixty four people having
a debate about the Have Your stick insect
Say
talentless, jealous, single women and haters are
embroiled in a patriotic debate
about themselves
a digital mirror sputters
the lines rage aimless
the passion is aimless.
(Morris 2009, 4, ll. 1–14)
The poem is striking, with visual properties designed to evoke the type of affective reaction and sensationalism of newspaper headlines and clickable, online advertorials. Morris mimics media conventions, for example, the way in which TV collapses the high and low debate into sensationalized formulas ready to be wheeled out at any time. There is a “botox debate” but also a “debate about” “having / a debate” as well as a debate “about themselves,” with the repetition replicating the formulaic production of vacant debate and implying a concomitant hollowing out of our engagement of such; we consume debates regardless of their content. But, Morris is not writing from a secure position of privilege; she is complicit in, and part of, the processes she describes. Hence, the poem turns on itself toward the end, registering an enervation around the futility of rage. This deflation is mirrored, like the “digital mirror” sputtering, in the “aimless” placement of lines (just as the emboldened, italicized, and enlarged words appear arbitrary). Poetic production falters after such energetic inhabitation of media modes as well as parodic critique of such; it is a poetics which exhausts itself.
Comprising a range of discourses and poetic techniques, “Who Not to Speak To” is difficult to classify as representative of any one genre or species. Corcoran (2007, 4) suggests that this unclassifiability might be a particular feature of contemporary poetic practice. He notes, for example, how many of the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth‐Century English Poetry contain a preponderance of words relating to contradiction, such as “division,” “difference,” and “discrepancy,” and acknowledges that many poems of the past half century “appear to speak against themselves, to engage in sometimes fraught dialogues of the self with the self, or of the poem with its own origins, traditions and generic characterisations” (my emphasis). These poems, Corcoran argues, “become the scenes of anxieties, tensions, distresses, uncertainties, contentions, and mobilities.” It is the mobility and protean nature of innovative or experimental poetry that makes it difficult to classify; only a term such as Urtext‐species will do. Innovative poetry questions the whole enterprise of genre classification; critiquing classification is its default imperative. In “History and Genre,” Cohen (2014, 53) suggests that “genre concepts in theory and practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons.” Since the 1960s, the Western world has experienced the unprecedented and largely unchecked exponential growth of global market capitalism. Since the 1960s, innovative and experimental poets have used poetry and poetic form to think through a whole range of theoretical, cultural, social, and political issues. In innovative poetry, then, self‐consciousness is part of a critique of common assumptions about language and the stable self against a background of consumer capitalism. Good contemporary poetry will have a sophisticated understanding of its complicity in a late capitalist world of rampant consumption and competitiveness and will offer a reader glimpses of an awareness of such, as well as imaginative alternatives. As Corcoran (2007, 5) puts it: “Modern poetry, it seems, is nowhere more characteristic of itself than when anxiously but scrupulously doubting itself.” And perhaps this doubt, and this evasion of becoming a product, works against the very act of literary classification.
References
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