Total Literary Stuffheads
The TLS (Times Literary Supplement), organ of utter establishment-led poetry criticism and wrong-headed thought in the department of poetic amour, devoted a few square inches to the newly published Infinite Difference anthology in their March 19 issue, singled out my work as being particularly irritating to them, and made a kind of sorrowful plea about shared experience (the piece is archived here). I have to view this as good news because it proves that what we – that’s me and my poetic colleagues – have been doing, is right, insofar as it is rankling to those with whom we disagree wholeheartedly. That dissonance is expected, in other words. That my work is quoted in the TLS at all is merely evidence of the ambitious and peculiar task that Shearsman undertakes with Infinite Difference in collecting what it calls ‘other poetries’, written by women in the UK – to bring poetry that is written against mainstream regulations into the mainstream.
It’s also terrible news, on the other hand, in that it tells us what we already know: that serious poetry is not discussed in a serious way by publications that consider themselves to be serious. The oppositions are empty. No real critique is attempted. The TLS’s irritated response to my and Frances Kruk’s work was, as it were, to let the work speak for itself, supposedly by way of its contradictions. But how does Frances’ statement contrast with Carrie Etter’s introduction? Etter motions towards doing away with ‘gendered critical language’, Frances writes that her female physiognomy is integral to her writing, and the TLS lazily brackets them together, saying that both use notions that are ‘gendered’. But to spell it out: critical language and poetic language are different orders of discourse, with different aims, intentions and ideologies. It doesn’t take a flash monkey to figure it out. [What on earth is a flash monkey and why wasn’t I invited?]
Gendered critical writing, if anything, is a reflection of the critic, not the work they critique. As I attempted to return my attention to a previous argument with Andrea Brady’s Saw Fit (printed in IraQuid, (Barque Press, 2004)), I recalled an essay by the Cambridge poet John Wilkinson which took umbrage at my initial position and used a metaphor of women’s underclothing to illustrate his point.
[…] Brady’s book finishes with her crudest, bitterest, and most tabloid-contingent of lines; she ends by defiling the elegance of her own prosody, loosening its stays […]. John Wilkinson, ‘Off the Grid’, Chicago Review 53.1 (Spring 2007): 95-115, reprinted in The Lyric Touch (Cambridge: Salt, 2007).
This is ‘gendered criticism’, certainly. Is there not something so glaringly odd about Wilkinson’s choice of metaphor, painting for us the image of Brady ‘defiling’ the usually tight fittings of her prosody with a lecherous loosening, out of which pours unrestrained flesh, titillating and taboo? Is this some kind of accidental fallout, that clings just barely, although enough to matter, to the real issues at hand, of badly written gender roles, sexism, and male authority? The metaphor seems almost audacious in the context. Even as a bad joke.
Denise Riley’s use of gendered criticism, in the essay ‘Malediction’, warns of the dangers of being spoken by language, rather than speaking it.
What it takes for me, apropos being or not being a bad speaker myself, is not to be a beautiful soul with the hem of my skirts drawn aside from the mud of linguistic harm, but to elect whether to broadcast or to repress the inward yet still thoroughly worldly chattering of imported speech that fills me.
Where Wilkinson has Brady rolling in the muck with her prosodic underclothes, Riley carefully rejects the ladylike countenance that would embroider her womanhood to her silence in a neat and socially-imposed fashion.
Gendered criticism can also look like a Sun Page 3 piece.
Then I noted the author’s name, which happened to be the same as a young lady I briefly worked with in the late 90’s at a small coffeehouse in Westwood, California. The Sandra I knew was still a girl in a woman’s body. Pretty, slim, and as I recall having a lovely cleavage […] (from a review of Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini that appeared online at amazon.co.uk [the comment has since been removed]).
But these three very different gendered modes of critical language have no bearing on whether or not a woman writes with her feminine physiognomy in mind. All to say, just in case it wasn’t clear (although of course it was), the implied critique of Frances’ statement is a non-event.
I’ve recently realized (as the sky cracks open and the most ominous thunder I’ve ever witnessed breaks rain over South London) that criticism is less about being critical and more about trusting the author and trying to understand the subtleties of their project. In which case, all of the disparities mean something. There is no absolute (peal of lightning) meaning. That’s why you end up asking, Why do these poems feel strange to me? Why don’t I know what to do with them? These are the kinds of questions that make a Willem de Kooning painting such as Pink Angels (1945) be ‘about’ exhausted blondes, sex, dinosaurs, and a soured rubber heart, instead of just being wrong or inaccessible because it doesn’t give us the shapes exactly as we are used to seeing them before our eyes.
Perhaps I was not clear enough when I wrote, in Infinite Difference:
It depresses me when someone says … ‘I don’t get poetry’, as if it were locked in a box.
The idea that a poem can be ‘got’ depresses me because it excludes a) non-linguistic forms of response, and b) original critical thinking. Both are necessary in order for poetry to remain a dynamic art form, an expectation leveled at just about every other art form going. At best, the TLS response to Infinite Difference reminds me of Charles Dickens’ letter to The Times, 7 May 1851, in which he responded to an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite work citing a ‘strange disorder of the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity’. At worst, it makes the business of criticism, which ought to be the provocation of original thought and engaged critique, look like the shutting down of material that does not conform to the standard interpretive model. As if a poem were something to be got, instead of read. Something to be got instead of felt. Something to be got instead of considered. Something to be got in the sale. Do you get me? I don’t want you to get my poem, I want you to move with it, be troubled by it, and quick like it. Arthur Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, poetry is not JENGA. It is a site for negotiating new modes of articulation, and those are not necessarily going to be figural or literal. Not necessarily pleasuring your garden shed. But then, there has always been this sort of friction among poetic schools. See the wonderful omission of the Potts-Herd run of Poetry Review from A Century of Poetry Review for a recent example of the warring clans in action.
When will it end? Maybe soon. I was really hopping pleased to see this piece on Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy up at The New Statesman, inviting readers to consider committed, unusual poetic work in a new way, to listen to it a number of times, and to allow their expectations to be confounded. Talk about trail-blazing. Meanwhile the TLS are still stumbling around in the dark with battery-operated flashlights, lumbered down by Safari gear, getting eaten alive by mosquitos and blaming the natives. Hum.
But poor TLS, lost in the forest. It is sad that the end of the review mentions poets ‘prepared to meet shared experience even half way’. In my mind and my knowledge of the kinds of poetries typically published and praised by the TLS, it is not shared experience that counts, but personal experience manufactured into chewable tablet form: the poem that doesn’t float in a reading space without a six minute introduction, the poem whose subject matter is confined to the domestic experiences of Everyman – the extreme platitudes that all of us will find ourselves in one day – crying at the kitchen table, furious by the fire, saddened in the street, elated in the hospital - all of which omit the specific and reduce us to mass psychology.
Ironic, isn’t it, that a poetry like ours – that’s mine and my poetic colleagues’ – in fact relies on shared experience, both in criticism and engagement with performance as well as in a tacit understanding that a way must be found in poetry of speaking with more than one voice. This is why you see the first person plural pronoun in so much of this poetry – my own included: the ‘we’ that creates community, even where there is none. But is that what you (not ‘we’) really want – to be met halfway? And not coyly as far as Cho Fu Sa? This isn’t about extending a hand to the reader, come dear, let me help you up the steps, it’s about a reading experience that you make up as you go along. It’s about creating culture instead of reproducing it. And the response sparked was not boxed beforehand, but flipping about and forming inside you as you read on, unsure of the way, and when it was very, very good it made you want to know more things, to know more words, to evacuate yourself from arbitrary social facts, and best of all, to - split an infinitive for want of a better word – do something.
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