I'd like poetry a lot more if it wasn't for all the poets.
Okay, a slightly contentious title perhaps, though I am only half-joking. I know a fair few poets, and I rather like the vast majority of them, what I'm referring to here is a matter of quantity, as opposed to quality. For a while I found it a bit of an issue, though looking back it was another excuse. I should explain myself a little.
As this blog has already explained, I dropped off the writing radar for a while, whilst doing this, social media happened, by the time I turned round, there were poets everywhere. Coming out of the trees of Facebook, swarming the walls of Twitter (I imagine that they're infesting Insta as well, but I haven't dared check, Instagram is strictly for the other half of my dual life, and when the poetry world meets the chef world, mutual incomprehension and head-scratching is often the result).
I am not, in any way shape or form, anti social-media, despite its undoubted contribution to division in society and the cheapening of debate, I regard it much as the American firearms enthusiast does their beloved guns. Social Media doesn't ruin everything. Idiots ruin everything. However, it has served to highlight precisely how much poetry there is out there. How many presses, how many poets. How much to read and try to keep up with. How much to sift through. How much is absolutely terrible.
I didn't think I really had the time to keep up.
Faced with all this plurality, it's easy to retreat to what you know, to rely on established networks of trusted respondents to point out things you may have missed; there is an interesting discussion to be had about the intellectual morality of this, are you deliberately narrowing your vision, are you deliberately self-limiting, will your reading, and, by extension writing life be degraded as a result, or ,rather, not be all it could be? It's an interesting question, and one to which I have yet to fully settle on a satisfactory answer. Because as I sort of said just a paragraph above, the fact that there's a lot of poetry out there means that there's a lot of bloody awful poetry out there. I'll defend to the death people's right to write it, but I don't have time to wade through it all to get to the stuff I'll like it. Hpwever, I feel a sense of unease, of feeling that by not reading everything, I may be missing out on something
For a while this was a handy excuse for me. I even wrote about it, tongue only slightly in cheek, for the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics research group journal, in "Not-writing: an anti-poetics" I took the view that the act of not writing a piece is in and of itself a creative act, and a necessary response to the vast amount of poetry out there. The unwritten poem could be brilliant, it's also an act of not inflicting an act of reading on an as yet undecided reader.
I was largely joking, but I was also working through something I was finding slightly vexatious at the time, in a scrap of unfinished poem I wrote it was "the quantitative easing of language", I was reading a lot of crap at this point, and not all of it by choice, as the internet does have a tendency to inflict people on you. It was becoming a frustrating experience.
Part of the thinking was summed up by a brilliant tweet I saw recently in response to the current outbreak of COVID-19:
"The first poet I see writing a 'Corona of Sonnets' is going to get beaten to death"
It's been a trying few years, politically, and it's only natural that poetry as a whole reflects that, some respond brilliantly, others less so. For every brilliant exploration of the state of things, there are two hundreds spleneticf rabnts.Maybe, to paraphrase the marvellous film Airplane, I picked a bad week to give up reading stuff I know I'd like.
In the face of all these words, it can be easy to feel slightly overwhelmed. It also begs the question of whether writing anything at all is a good idea. Is it a good idea to contribute yet more when there is already so bloody much? Is it even morally a good decision, to inflict oneself upon potential readers, who've already got their own things to be dealing with? For a while, these questions preoccupied me, I really wasn't sure if the world needed yet another sodding poet.
I got over it, obviously, I'm inflicting this on you, after all.
As this blog has already explained, I dropped off the writing radar for a while, whilst doing this, social media happened, by the time I turned round, there were poets everywhere. Coming out of the trees of Facebook, swarming the walls of Twitter (I imagine that they're infesting Insta as well, but I haven't dared check, Instagram is strictly for the other half of my dual life, and when the poetry world meets the chef world, mutual incomprehension and head-scratching is often the result).
I am not, in any way shape or form, anti social-media, despite its undoubted contribution to division in society and the cheapening of debate, I regard it much as the American firearms enthusiast does their beloved guns. Social Media doesn't ruin everything. Idiots ruin everything. However, it has served to highlight precisely how much poetry there is out there. How many presses, how many poets. How much to read and try to keep up with. How much to sift through. How much is absolutely terrible.
I didn't think I really had the time to keep up.
Faced with all this plurality, it's easy to retreat to what you know, to rely on established networks of trusted respondents to point out things you may have missed; there is an interesting discussion to be had about the intellectual morality of this, are you deliberately narrowing your vision, are you deliberately self-limiting, will your reading, and, by extension writing life be degraded as a result, or ,rather, not be all it could be? It's an interesting question, and one to which I have yet to fully settle on a satisfactory answer. Because as I sort of said just a paragraph above, the fact that there's a lot of poetry out there means that there's a lot of bloody awful poetry out there. I'll defend to the death people's right to write it, but I don't have time to wade through it all to get to the stuff I'll like it. Hpwever, I feel a sense of unease, of feeling that by not reading everything, I may be missing out on something
For a while this was a handy excuse for me. I even wrote about it, tongue only slightly in cheek, for the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics research group journal, in "Not-writing: an anti-poetics" I took the view that the act of not writing a piece is in and of itself a creative act, and a necessary response to the vast amount of poetry out there. The unwritten poem could be brilliant, it's also an act of not inflicting an act of reading on an as yet undecided reader.
I was largely joking, but I was also working through something I was finding slightly vexatious at the time, in a scrap of unfinished poem I wrote it was "the quantitative easing of language", I was reading a lot of crap at this point, and not all of it by choice, as the internet does have a tendency to inflict people on you. It was becoming a frustrating experience.
Part of the thinking was summed up by a brilliant tweet I saw recently in response to the current outbreak of COVID-19:
"The first poet I see writing a 'Corona of Sonnets' is going to get beaten to death"
It's been a trying few years, politically, and it's only natural that poetry as a whole reflects that, some respond brilliantly, others less so. For every brilliant exploration of the state of things, there are two hundreds spleneticf rabnts.Maybe, to paraphrase the marvellous film Airplane, I picked a bad week to give up reading stuff I know I'd like.
In the face of all these words, it can be easy to feel slightly overwhelmed. It also begs the question of whether writing anything at all is a good idea. Is it a good idea to contribute yet more when there is already so bloody much? Is it even morally a good decision, to inflict oneself upon potential readers, who've already got their own things to be dealing with? For a while, these questions preoccupied me, I really wasn't sure if the world needed yet another sodding poet.
I got over it, obviously, I'm inflicting this on you, after all.
posted by Matt | 2:18 AM
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