Fifty-Two Ways To Leave Your Lover

We're in the pub, post workshop, when someone passes round the new Poetry Review Mag. Within moments we are riveted by Peter McDonald's scalp job on Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Quotes are read out. This is like watching the Headmaster public flogging of the flighty schoolgirl: is it good for you too? We can't take our eyes away. Wow.

So it may at first reading come across as unnecessarily cruel. Or it may not, depending on your view of the book itself. Whatever he is up to, there's little doubt that he is (deliberately?) missing the point. Padel was telling the game Independent reader that the waters in the contemporary poetry world are warm: 'Come on in' she sirens, 'it will be fine.' She is suggesting that reading contemporary poetry is not going to be boring, academic, irrelevant to your life and bent on glorifying those dinosaurs who reach areas of scholastic boredom few even imagined existed. Instead poetry is now fun, relevant, and about to be hip. Like it was supposed to be in ca. 1990.

McDonald has very little time for this project. Ruth has slunk into his kitchen and regurgitated a mangled sparrow. So, in a longstanding tradition, instead of sweeping it up and muttering that cats will be cats, he finds a high (and moste elegante) tower from which to do something quite inelegant on our Ruth. I for one feel like shouting: 'Let your hair down Peter; and we'll climb up.'

But once you remove the tone of repulsed disapprobation there is a perfectly reasonable set of points he wants answered. What role, if any, should contemporary poetry have in current culture? Should it try to win an audience among the viewers of Big Brother? Should it absorb or reject the communicative environment of the day — advertising, television, gossip magazines yadayadayada? Or sit in the old highe towere (low bunker?) and watch the world pastiche itself to death?

McDonald goes on to refine the argument: 'A worrying consequence of this is the transformation of educational writing about poetry into a PR job for poetry: and then, inevitably, into a sales-pitch for a small band of contemporary poets. The reading public, whose intelligence ought to be respected, quite rightly feel suspicious about much contemporary poetry, partly because of the blatant nonsense, and equally obvious nepotism, which show themselves time and again in the way that poetry is promoted.'

Here, the Christ Church academic seems to be implying that poetry does not need a PR job. I wonder. The gilded halls of academe might create the impression that the world is full of bright young things just dying to get their hands on the latest Ciaran Carson translation of Dante, or ready to wade into the seventh circle of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, but in London it doesn't quite feel that way. Part of me believes that the current reading public (those who go to the cinema, theatre, read novels etc.) would get a smile from at least a small part of the contemporary scene. But to do so a reader does need to get into the habit of reading a smatter of current poetry, and this hurdle is probably greater than we might think.

The reality is that NOBODY IS READING (contemporary) POETRY. It desperately needs not just Saatchi and Saatchi, but Matthew Freud on permanent account as well to give it a leg up. The question isn't does it need PR. OF COURSE IT BLOODY WELL DOES. The issue is: do we hire Padel and Co? Is this the right approach?

On the other hand, when I took up a similar theme with Alan Jenkins, he was adamant that the there simply is no way of increasing the number of readers. In Alan's view, poetry readers are self -selective, and no amount of promotional bullshit is going to change that. Is he right? Well ask yourself how many people you know who have a reasonable poetry collection (say at least 50 books), but don't write themselves (or want to?). How many non-poets go to poetry readings? In London I'd say we'd be hard pressed to fill a couple of football teams with them. It does look like poetry is not refreshing parts other beers don't reach.

In fact, sales figures give a very accurate picture of where we stand. Lets assume that there are 1000 practicing poets (who read others, submit to magazines etc). A top poet (excluding Heaney, Armitage and Duffy) can expect to sell about 3000 copies over time. That means that there could be 2000 people who don't actively write but are willing to shell out for a book by someone well known. That is the contemporary poetry audience. Out of 55 million in this country, or 3/400 million worldwide. Hmm. Is this healthy, or is everybody TOTALLY wasting their time? Whatever.

What about the sub charge: 'A sales-pitch for a small band of contemporary poets.' I can't really see Macdonald out on Tottenham Court Road (or Christ Church Cloister) holding up a placard: 'READ ALL CONTEMPORARY POETS' or hawking the 'Everybody is really good!' T-shirt. Yeats of course said 'There are too many of us' (and this in an age when it wasn't eccentric to read poetry). If Ruth Padel is pushing only one corner of the market, isn't that her right? Isn't selectivity part of the job of promotion? How many poets does McDonald think are worth placarding?

It's almost inevitable that we think he is simply disapproving of her choices, not her quantities. And we're probably also safe to assume that he means she is over-selling the mainstream names and New Gen. But what on earth is wrong with that? For all his charges of 'obvious nepotism' I don't see hundreds of Padel nieces and nephews crowding the magazines or getting plum readings. If McDonald wants to champion writers, what is stopping him? The fact is he's one of the few critics (or poet/ critics) who isn't syntactically brain dead so if he wants to raise the flag for somebody I for one would certainly take notice.

But that's not what McDonald is on about. From his vantage point what he sees is that: 'In teaching poetry, the place to start is form: and poetic form is a subject that opens out to the most complicated, and important, issues of language, audience, and meaning.' Hello? Peter, can I butt in here? If we use words like 'teach' our prospective new readers veins go cyrogenic. Can you hear that noise? It's not buffalo, it's the audience stampeding towards the door. Ruth's project may be as tasteless as you like, but she is trying to get to the non-converted. And if her book won poetry 500 more readers this would be worth not just the statue but the stained glass Abbey window thrown in as well.

'Nuffsaid
21 June 2003

Serious Poetry: form and authority, from Yeats to Hill by Peter McDonald is now available from OUP.