the mainstream of british poetry

I've been taking part in a current discussion at the British-Irish-Poets Forum (the title is "Forward for RFL"), of which the general theme (at least as far as my own contributions to it are concerned) is

1. meditations on two recent awards of poetry prizes to poets that are usually considered distinctly alternative (R.F. Langley and Giles Goodland);

2. the vexed term "mainstream" (in a UK poetry context), and whether it sheds more heat than light.

On this latter topic, I wrote this:

I accept, of course, that to use a generalization like "mainstream" involves inevitable fuzzy edges, that specific assignments aren't empirically provable, that the accusation of an undue sureness is probably just (though I don't indeed feel that sureness very securely, and I'm sorry if it sounds as if I do).

And certainly the word "mainstream" often implies a strongly pejorative opinion, at least in a context such as this forum. But it has not always been so used. I recall that the first time I really became interestedly aware of the word was in the context of Morrison and Motion's 1982 anthology of Contemporary British Poetry - I forget exactly what the back cover said, but it was something along the lines of "twenty fantastic voices from the mainstream of modern British poetry". I didn't share their tastes, in fact felt uneasy about that anthology in many ways, but I don't have a problem with the meaning of the term in the way they were using it and I'm not yet ready to dispense with it. To have a working conception of a mainstream seems to me necessary in order to have a conception of the non-mainstream - an innovative poet perhaps doesn't need it in order to write poetry, but if I'm going to give some order to my thoughts when I'm writing about modern poets, I do find it pretty useful.

And I'm aware that it covered at least four, largely overlapping but not identical, ideas: 1. the kind of poetry that could be found in High Street bookshops and was published by the larger presses, Faber Cape and Oxford at the time; 2. the kind of poetry that is most bought and most widely distributed, e.g. for school use (according to Wikipedia, in 2007, two-thirds of the UK sales of poetry books by living authors were by Seamus Heaney); 3. a sociological structure that embraced e.g. the published poets who read each other's work, the many enthusiasts and amateurs who read the published poets, particular ways of reading and thinking about and talking about and generally doing poetry, an implicit canon, the associated institutions, magazines, competitions, radio programmes, etc. (a structure that, on the whole, innovative poetry communities markedly distanced themselves from – it’s perhaps in this area, above all, that I share Mark [Weiss]’s sense of a very distinct boundary); 4. a particular style or bundle of stylistic features typical of the aforementioned. To which I should now, perhaps, add 5. widely held conceptions of the above, as much discussed (often, though not always, in a hostile spirit) by people who discuss poetry - accurate or not, those portrayals are now themselves part of the history of literature.

So I guess I will carry on using the term, despite the perennial risk of being interpreted as merely hurling mud at someone. And it will be apparent that I consider poetry competitions and poetry prizes as historically typifying the mainstream (in sense 3) and historically not typifying alt-poetry communities (Peter [Riley]’s view of such things, I’d guess, would be shared by many).

And, re the origin and early history of the term "mainstream":

Looking at the OED, there is indeed a riverine background (=principal current) but it’s probably not very present in most users’ minds today.

Nor, regretfully, is the notion of “mainstream jazz” – originally a fifties style between big band and modern jazz, approximately. But evidently still in use, e.g. on the cover of – contrived excuse for a plug - Joan Davis’ magnificent album “Promiseland” (2005).

You can see the metaphor in development in Arnold: “Byron and Shelley will be long remembered‥for their‥Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature.”

Ford Madox Ford (1938): “The very considerable influence that Mr. Pound‥exercised on literary mainstreams.”

What the OED entry doesn’t really show is how the word exploded in use around the 1970s (?), mainly in the sphere of mass media and culture, then extended in every direction (politics, economics, cinema...) . That, no doubt, is the direct source of its reintroduction into the poetry world.

At some stage around the 1950s, the idea developed of identifying yourself with the perennial outsiders, and consequently conceiving the mainstream in intrinsically negative terms. I think (though I can’t really prove this right now) that this was a pretty significant change in common conceptions of culture, and it happened in all sorts of cultural fields at around the same time.

1958, E.Crispin: (in Best SF Three 9) “Main~stream fiction‥has been almost uniformly catatonic in its withdrawal from environment.”

Yet Arnold’s idea of a mainstream not so much as a nasty conventional style but as the desirable and natural destination for any original artist who hopes to truly engage with her/his society still remains relevant.

There’s a pretty good discussion of this two-sided aspect of “mainstream” here (in connection with black and Asian British film)...

The whole wide-ranging discussion is worth a look (and that's probably the only way to really make sense of it). The discussion also touches on Guido Gozzano, Ivor Novello, Nabokov's lepidopterism (Polyomattus blues), and William Barnes' "My Orchet in Linden Lea", among other more or less interesting things.



*

Mainstream Rock

In the US, there's a Billboard rock chart begun in March 1981, which has had several names:

Top Tracks (1981)
Top Rock Tracks (1984)
Album Rock Tracks (1986)
Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks (1996-03)

Essentially this is a chart of music played on "mainstream rock" radio, more recently known as "heritage rock". The chart is no longer published, though it's still compiled; and in the dark days of its terminal senescence it even includes alternative rock, whereas the whole point of the original chart was that it excluded anything that had even the faintest kind of alternative heritage. The change in its name over the years is a chart in itself: a chart showing the steady decline of rock's cultural centrality.

more seedlings

I'm still compiling and completing the previous brief-hist/literary/cultural post, but I thought I'd better begin another one because it was getting pretty long.

R.F. Langley died recently. I don't really know what it was that prompted me, but in a £20 splurge of extravagance I've bought all his books; they turned up today and I just had time to read "Mariana" (which fascinatingly wipes over Tennyson) before I left for work.

Meanwhile I'm reading Giles Goodland's What The Things Sang. It's been well reviewed by Alastair Noon in Jacket, and Steve Spence in Stride; some of what they say I will inevitably repeat when I inevitably write about this for IS. It's an overwhelming book; one of those poetry volumes you definitely can't read through at one sitting. I'm about a quarter of the way through and nowhere near collecting my thoughts.

I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm very excited to hear there's a Bob Cobbing Radio 4 programe online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zlbl5

!WARNING: SPOILERS FROM THE OFF!
Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. Abridged audiobooks, read by Martin Wenner. Wenner is evidently bilingual, and my greatest pleasure when listening to this was probably his pronunciation of the Swedish names and placenames. He has quite a lot of fun. When Blomkvist and Salander are in London speaking English to English characters, they suddenly develop strong Swedish accents. In the Australian scene Wenner switches between Swedish-English (Blomkvist), Australian-English (Jeff) and Swedish-Australian-English (Harriet). Clever stuff.

Having got to the end, I am now re-listening to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The title in Swedish was Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), which says a lot more about what the book is. The abridgement contains about a fifth of the text; satisfying listening (compared e.g. to the disembowelled 2-CD Villette I heard recently) but naturally not much good for detailed textual queries. (For example, I've only just discovered that there's an enigmatic prelude to The Girl Who Played With Fire, it's not in the audiobook.)

With that caveat, I think this first vol is the best of the three books Larsson managed to complete, from most points of view. Because here he drew most enquiringly on his knowledge of far-right groups and his witnessing of violence against women; here his wonderful Salander's mixture of feelings is more intuitively portrayed than later; the violence is more scary; and the Vangers are more credible than the buffoonish Niedermans and doddery Section professionals that take up space in the later books. Credible in a way. Martin Vanger's diseased woman-hating psychopathy has just horribly shown up in Swindon (formerly claimed to be the most crime-free town in the UK) - but it seems unlikely the Swindon killer is the CEO of a large company.

Astrid Lindgren, Elizabeth George, Dorothy Sayers, Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid. Why does Blomkvist read only female authors? (I reckon it's fully as ingeniously planned as the "Leviticus" murders.)

In which future volume did Larsson intend to bring Camilla forward? (Lisbeth's sister, who remains resolutely unspoken about in the three completed volumes.) Larsson uses a technique of selective consciousness-reporting. Thus in "The Girl Who Played With Fire" the whole slowly developing mystery about Zalachenko is only sustained because until Larsson is ready he tells us not a word about Salander's father. Even though, in other respects, we spend a load of time inside Salander's consciousness. Is this "cheating"? While consciousness-reporting is always selective (though novelists tend to create the illusion that this is not so), are certain conventions of disclosure to be obeyed, are authorial silences about germane matters something we should think about? Not, I mean, because of rules of whodunnits, that's neither here nor there, but perhaps because the reader has been manipulated into spending a lot of time thinking about something that isn't worth thinking about, a mere manufactured puzzle (I'm remembering C.S. Lewis complaining about Chapman's Shadow of Night). Maybe that's not the question to ask. Is it also about plausibility - people would be bound to demand answers about Camilla at various points in the books. (From the mythological point of view it seems relevant that Anita and Cecilia Vanger are also twins.)

I am also reading: Moliere's The Misanthrope; Home Run (book about escapes from Nazi Europe); John Steinbeck's East of Eden; Chris Goode's blog (recently talking about poetry as a window or a wall, analogies that deserve further examination).

lit ephem

I'm employed now.

I'm translating a Swedish popular song "Vårvindar friska" (spring breezes) and some snapsvise elaborations. Probably the song is popular more for the melody than the words. It's one of those aaba tunes where the "a" bit is in the minor and it switches dramatically and crescendoingly into the major at "b". (The funeral march in Chopin's sonata has the same format.)

I've read Catherine Daly's Vauxhall and I'll write about it soon. I had my doubts about Vauxhall after some quick dips and I looked askance at it for about a year or more untill I finally got the space to sit down and read it all through; when I got to the end I realized it's a kite that flies. Is it so evidently a step into the dark as, say, Papercraft or To Delite? Is it more a summation of "this is the things I can do", only better than ever? The latter is my first thought. I'm kind of surmising that the unexpected lack of new publications since Vauxhall (Daly had kept up a stream of pubs to that point) indicates a pause for new direction.

Also, Tony Lopez' Darwin. If Ron Silliman was talking about the cover when he hyperbolized that it "might just be" the most beautiful book of poetry ever (which he wasn't, not consciously at least), then I have to warn you that this cover does tend to flake off, because Acts of Language have printed it cheaply on an office colour printer, it isn't a proper book jacket. But anyway, it is a neat cover (Iceland mountain scenery with some dirty snow and a white streak of sky on the horizon). And this is another brilliant book, consisting of found sentences. Ron was right to draw attention to the formal aspect of the book and he drew out the variable paragraph lengths and called this a soft aspect, which it is, but there's a hard aspect too because the sentences in each of the ten sections add up to 55.

Some of the sentences can be Googled. E.g. the man in the beige or golden trousers was a description of a Maddy suspect in the Guardian. Surprisingly, Darwin's own writings, which provide a good many of the sentences, don't seem to be on the Internet. That can't be right, that must be Google being weird.

You know how Giles Goodland's Capital provides a reference for every sentence? Well, what I mean is it would be great if you did make a poem of this kind (i.e. not a flarf poem) in which Every sentence was Googlable, because then it would mean that if you read a sentence that you wanted to explore further, you could just go and do it straight away, leaving the poem for a moment in the same way that you leave a room. In this way the poem would perhaps have a generous transparency, it would no longer so tightly control what you did with its materials.

For me Darwin has a definite subject, I think Lopez's stuff always does, which in this case I guess you could define as the post-Darwinized world. A lot of the sentences are scientific, academic, or high-minded, quality journalism. There's a paucity of women's names - well it goes deeper than that, I feel a conspicuous lack of a female presence in the many-sourced writings. That builds a tension up. And a lack of conversation, of spontaneity, of frivolity. Is it even a conspicuous lack of real life altogether? You begin to feel stifled, as if the quoted sentences are doubly-written hence doubly distanced from the world in which we exist... You can't help noticing, also, how many of the undeniably highminded scientific extracts do involve animal testing. I think this is all deliberate and Darwin is possibly just as angry a poem as that one about bullimia in Conductors of Chaos. - I hear on the radio this morning a report that most bullimics have been bullied. A sort of feeling of being bullied is how I respond to the aggregated highminded sentences of the scientists and pundits. For it is not only faith schools (see below) that enforce a view of life.

So what's the relationship between a literary work like this and science? does it 1. seek to go on its own totally independent exploratory journey, using science as just one of its fuels 2. or try to register resonances in a world admittedly influenced by science 3. try to compose a critique of science, inevitably and necessarily from without? The latter is really what I'm interested in. I think you can criticize science as a social force by straightforward observation. Can you also erect an alternative methodology to go behind science? Such as collage in this case? or religion? or homeopathy?

Because I've also recently read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which looked irresistible in the bookshop and was very OK in reality, though not the unprecedented masterpiece of thinking and literature that the gushers would have you think. Dawkins is indeed (as he hopes) consciousness-raising on religious labelling of children and on religious schools - i.e. I think differently about these things now than I did before I read the book: last week I didn't see either of these things as presenting a moral problem but now I do. And I like where he starts to go on the "by-product of evolutionary advantage" theory re why religion exists. His descriptions of the evils of religion are temperate and hence all the more overwhelming. But (talking about sectarian violence) it might well have been supplemented by a recognition that religion often becomes a place of last defence in response to the oppression of others.

His comments about the traditional arguments for God are suave dismissals rather than refutations. His own argument for the non-existence of God is likewise traditional and open to question (variant on the argument from improbability, or who made God? - basically an overturning of Paley in the light of Darwin). Open to question re relevance - for does this argument not concern a creator who is just part of nature? Surely the sort of religious people who are interested in philosophical proofs or disproofs of god all accept evolution as a matter of course, so whatever they mean by god doesn't mean a creator such as appears in Dawkins' argument - therefore it may seem to miss its target. Even so, it may be dead right. He seems to underplay fine tuning. He scornfully mentions "the argument from present ignorance", yet doesn't reveal any means of countering it. He analogizes the origin of language with genetic drift, but that's not a good analogy at all. He agrees with Boenhoeffer in his scorn for "a god of the gaps", but Boenhoffer was merely wrong. There is no other kind of god. If I was a believer I would glorify this god of the gaps. It is not a diminution of god, more a definition of god. False spatial analogy says that as science closes more and more gaps, god shrinks. But does "present ignorance" really shrink? Or does additional knowledge mean additional gaps that we never even imagined before? That's another false spatial analogy maybe, but I reckon it's a better one. Dawkins derides those who leap in with the god-answer whenever we temporarily don't understand things. But why not admit that it is (maybe temporarily, maybe not) the right answer? that god=gap? that god simply is the sort of solution we imagine when we can't see any other.

The real problem with the lack of relativism is that Dawkins doesn't understand how two contradictory things can be true at the same time. His truth is simple. At one point he asks guilelessly how religions can claim belief as virtuous when belief is obviously something involuntary - you cannot choose what to believe. I absolutely disagree: overwhelmingly people do decide what they're going to believe. That is, what they're going to say they believe and even think they believe ("belief" fragments into a million neurons when you try and pin it down). Surely after Freud you have no excuse for such innocence. So Dawkins is constantly taking the statements or beliefs of religious people and treating them to scientific demolition, but this is a category mistake. This approach, you might guess, is more appropriate to an argument against fundamentalism than the evasive slippery faithful in an Anglican church or a "mind body and spirit" bookshelf. And certainly US Christian fundamentalism is a tragedy waiting to happen. But do even fundamentalists believe the bible literally (in the scientific sense of literally)? That last parenthesis, in fact, suggests the frail relevance of Dawkins' attack. I think fundamentalists have their own non-scientific idea of what "literally" means. I suggest that in the real world (as opposed to a philosopher's thought experiment) it is not really Possible to believe that the bible is true (scientific sense). But it is all too possible to be a fundamentalist.

Dawkins of course gives me that "two cultures" feeling. He's very 19th-century and comically very like C.S. Lewis as if they are not diametrically opposed ideologists at all, but two quarrelsome boys in a large Victorian children's nursery in an Oxford suburb. [That sentence seems, I discover, to betray unconscious recollection of Eagleton's review] He only understands light literature, children's literature, and Shakespeare. He quotes A.A. Milne. Modernism doesn't mean anything to him, nor does relativism. This oughtn't to be a surprise. I've written before about the costs of being a scientist, how it seems to be very difficult to live both in the art world and the science world at the same time. But of course it DOES take me by surprise. And I think, well, I know you know a lot (I do tend to address authors in this silently hectoring way while I'm reading their books)..., but all the sociological markers that I really understand (i.e. the literary ones) tell me that you don't know anything at all. It's an optical illusion of mixed signals that the arty reader has to over-ride.

(Of course it's not just about lit v science, there are also chasms between artistic communities. I caught my breath yesterday to hear the violinist Lara St John on the radio talking about being Tolkien-mad - no, not so much that, but - extolling Tolkien's prose as wonderfully musical. Maybe she's even right, but that's not the point. It's just socially infantile (in the literary world). Then she played her arrangement - for violin - of Liszt's Totentanz, which was beyond amazing... Well anyhow, people are very various and I suppose communities like the various literature ones are just designed to paper over the cracks of how appallingly different people are. If we within the self-protecting community were honest, who would not turn out to be near-illiterate, stupidly misinformed, or grossly and heretically prejudiced?

I've also been reading Cobbett, whose own hyperboles come to a climax in the country around Warminster (e.g. Bishopstrow)- he never found better meat than at Warminster market - it was evidently then not so conspicuously an army town. My own idea of Warminster is chiefly connected with the Little Chef, Morrisons, the park and the nature reserve. Cobbett's anti-Semitism affects me as a new disturbance. With Chopin or Wagner, the problem was how to accept that a violent anti-Semite might nevertheless produce great art. But at least I could say, well they don't sound like the sort of people I'd have got on with personally. With Cobbett, the problem is more searching - violent anti-Semitism in someone I find thoroughly pleasant company, someone I think I'd have got on with really well. The truth is, we are never really safe from evil beliefs, if we don't have them it's just an accident. Or should I, as Richard Dawkins thinks, say thank-you to science for nurturing the enlightened beliefs that I hope I share? Maybe...

And Martin Chuzzlewit, which I'm reading with a somber critical face on me, occasionally cracking against its will into helpless laughter.