<\/p>\n
Recently I bought an expensive\u00a0poetry magazine (no names no pack drill but it was North\u00a0London based) and found\u00a0almost every\u00a0poem in it impossible to understand.\u00a0 \u00a0I won’t quote from it for fear of offending individual contributors, but the general tone\u00a0was typified by a kind of cool insouciance toward the reader.\u00a0 Often starting\u00a0from a startling title (what they call in the hat trade a “fascinator”?)\u00a0each\u00a0 experiment seemed to proceed by irrational zig zags,\u00a0individual lines and images making separate sense but defying\u00a0emotional or intellectual coherence.\u00a0 A disruption of “normal” syntax and lack of punctuation was part and parcel of the house style.\u00a0\u00a0 By mistake I had\u00a0stumbled on an outpost of what might loosely be described\u00a0as American-influenced “L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E\u201d Poetry. As far as I understand it (and there are volumes of justification, all with respectable academic provenance\u00a0) the main idea of the \u201cL-A-N-G-U-A-G-E\u201d\u00a0Poets was to intrigue and entertain the reader with the surface textures of language, perhaps playing with their linguistic medium in much the same ways that abstract expressionist artists might have used paint.\u00a0 To be \u201cdifficult\u201d, to make the reader work at different possibilities, was to that avant-garde school a merit, not an obstacle. \u00a0(One immediate objection to the idea of words being compared to non-figurative painting is that surely language can never ever be abstract…groups of words will always tend towards significance, meaning?) \u00a0 Having worked for over 40 years as a secondary schoolteacher, trying to get 5th<\/sup> and 6th formers interested in any kind of poetry,\u00a0it is perhaps not surprising that I\u2019m impatient with poems that appear to\u00a0relish\u00a0their obscurities. Yes, of course poetry can often be difficult in many ways; Eliot, Manley Hopkins, Browning and Wallace Stevens are all poets I have struggled with at different times, but ultimately have found to make rewarding sense. I also recognise the possibility of changing one\u2019s mind, gradually \u201cgrowing into\u201d poets who at first seem off-putting.\u00a0 Luckily from a classroom teacher\u2019s point of view, much 20th century poetry \u00a0\u2013 from the 1960s to the 1980s, Heaney, Larkin, Hughes, Gunn and Harrison, for instance – has been \u201cstudent friendly\u201d, inviting rather than evasive.\u00a0 I have seen unlikely lads respond enthusiastically to the animal poems of Ted Hughes and roomfuls of trainee hair-dressers enjoy the lyricism and good humour of Carol Ann Duffy\u2019s poetry.\u00a0 As for the American tradition, I would always point students in the direction of Dickinson, Frost, Carlos Williams, Crowe Ransome and Lowell, (and yes, surprisingly, Corso, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti) rather than the experimental L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theoreticians of the East Coast. \u00a0I think what I am trying to say in this blog is that in a world full of communication (and other kinds of) difficulties, \u00a0such very difficult “far out” experimental poetry is a luxury which only academics \u00a0can find interesting; to the “ordinary reader” it feels exclusive, makes us feel stupid, shutting us out. To wash the distastefulness of that magazine out of my mind, I\u2019d like to end this piece by quoting as a whole the amusing poem by James Arlington Wright whose long title began this gripe. It has \u201cclear sounds to make\u201d.<\/p>\n Depressed by a book of bad poetry, I walk towards an unused pasture and invite the insects to join me<\/u><\/p>\n Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.<\/p>\n I climb a slight rise of grass. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I bought an expensive\u00a0poetry magazine (no names no pack drill but it was North\u00a0London based) and found\u00a0almost every\u00a0poem in it impossible to understand.\u00a0 \u00a0I won’t quote from it for fear of offending individual contributors, but the general tone\u00a0was typified by a kind of cool insouciance toward the reader.\u00a0 Often starting\u00a0from a startling title […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI do not want to disturb the ants
\nWho are walking single file up the fence post,
\nCarrying small white petals,
\nCasting shadows so frail that I can see through them.
\nI close my eyes for a moment and listen.
\nThe old grasshoppers
\nAre tired, they leap heavily now,
\nTheir thighs are burdened.
\nI want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
\nThen lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
\nIn the maple trees.<\/p>\n