A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960–2015
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Edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher Irish Poetry, 1960–2015 and David Malcolm
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Title: A companion to contemporary British and Irish poetry, 1960–2015 / edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher, David Malcolm.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2021. | Series: Blackwell companions to literature and culture ; 103 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013124 (print) | LCCN 2020013125 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118843208 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118843246 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118843253 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: English poetry–20th century–History and criticism. | English poetry–21st century–History and criticism. | Irish poetry–20th century–History and criticism. | Irish poetry–21st century–History and criticism.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013124
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013125
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Cover Image: Courtesy of Lothar Ponhold
Set in 10.5/13pt Garamond by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Notes on Contributors ix
Preface xvii
Section 1 Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse 1
1 Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse 3
Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm
Section 2 Contexts, Forms, Topics, and Movements 29
a. Institutions, Histories, Receptions
1 Some Institutions of the British and Irish (Sub)Fields of Poetry: Little Magazines, Publishers, Prizes, and Poetry in Translation 31
Wolfgang Görtschacher
2 Anthologies: Distortions and Corrections, Poetries, and Voices 63
David Kennedy
3 Minding the Trench: The Reception of British and Irish Poetry in America, 1960–2015 71
Daniel Bourne
4 Readers: Who Reads Modern Poetry? 87
Juha Virtanen
b. Genre, Kind, Technique
1 Manifestos and Poetics/Poets on Writing 97
Daniel Weston
2 The Genres of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry 107
Gareth Farmer
7 The Traditional Short Lyric Poem in Britain and Ireland, 1960–2015
Tim Liardet and Jennifer Militello
8 (Post)Modern Lyric Poetry
Alex Pestell
9 The Long Poem After Pound
c. Groupings, Themes
1
2
3
4
Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim
5 Poets of Ulster
6 The Martian School: Toward a Poetics of Wonder
Małgorzata Grzegorzewska
7
8 Concrete and Performance
Jerzy Jarniewicz
9
10
Bartosz Wójcik
7 “Now Put It Together”: Lee Harwood and the Gentle Art of Collage 511
Robert Sheppard
8 Listening to Words and Silence: The Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings 523 Jean Ward
9 “Forever in Excess”: Barry MacSweeney, Consumerism, and Popular Culture
Paul Batchelor
10 When Understanding Breaks in Waves: Voices and Messages in Edwin Morgan’s Poetry
Monika Kocot
11 Grace Nichols
Pilar Sánchez Calle
12 F. T. Prince
Will May
13 Kathleen Raine 583 Glyn Pursglove
14 “Everything Except Justice Is An Impertinence”: The Poetry of Peter Riley 595 Peter Hughes
15 Anne Stevenson 607 Eleanor Spencer
Notes on Contributors
Paul Batchelor is an associate professor of English literature and creative writing at Durham University. He wrote his PhD on Barry MacSweeney’s poetry at Newcastle University, and edited Reading Barry MacSweeney (NCLA/Bloodaxe, 2013). His poetry collections are The Sinking Road (Bloodaxe, 2008) and The Love Darg (Clutag, 2014). He reviews for the Times Literary Supplement
Daniel Bourne is a poet, translator of poetry from Polish, editor, and professor of English and environmental studies at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, where he has taught creative writing and poetry since 1988. He attended Indiana University (Bloomington), where he received his Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature and history in 1979, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in 1987. He was a Fulbright fellow in Poland between 1985 and 1987. Bourne is an editor and founder of the Artful Dodge literary magazine.
Prudence Chamberlain is a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the coauthor of House of Mouse (KFS, 2016). Her poetry reviews have featured in Poetry Review, Hix Eros, and Shearsman Magazine, and her critical writing on feminism in both Gender and Education (2016) and Social Movement Studies (2014).
Ian C. Davidson is a poet and a critic. His recent poetry publications include Gateshead and Back (Crater, 2017), On the Way to Work (Shearsman, 2017), In Agitation (KFS, 2014), and The Tyne and Wear Poems (Red Squirrel, 2014). He edited the special Bill Griffiths issue for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and has published extensively on space and poetry and poetics. His recent critical work has examined relationships between mobility and writing in the work of Diane di Prima, George and Mary Oppen, Philip K. Dick, and Patrick Hamilton. After living in Wales for most of his life, he moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and then Dublin, where he works in UCD as professor of English, Drama and Film.
Hugh Dunkerley is reader in creative writing and contemporary poetry at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, where he runs the MA in creative writing. He is a critic and poet. His most recent poetry collections are Hare (2010) and Kin (both Cinnamon Press 2019).
Gareth Farmer is a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom. He is the coeditor of the open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
David Fuller is emeritus professor of English and former chairman of the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. From 2002 to 2007, he was also the university’s public orator. He has held a University of Durham Sir Derman Christopherson fellowship, and fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies of the University of Toronto, and the Yale Center for British Art. He is the author of Blake’s Heroic Argument (Croom Helm, 1988), James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Harvester, 1992), Signs of Grace (with David Brown, Cassell, 1995), and essays on a wide range of poetry, drama, and novels from Medieval to Modern, including work on Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Blake, Shelley, Keats, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and the theory and practice of criticism.
Wolfgang Görtschacher, senior assistant professor at the University of Salzburg, is the author of Little Magazine Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939–1993 (1993) and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (2000), owner‐director of the small press Poetry Salzburg, editor of the little magazine Poetry Salzburg Review, coeditor of the academic journal Moderne Sprachen, and the President of AAUTE (Austrian Association of University Teachers of English). He (co)edited So Also Ist Das/So That’s What It’s Like: Eine zweisprachige Anthologie britischer Gegenwartslyrik (2002), Raw Amber: An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Poetry (2002), The Romantic Imagination: A William Oxley Casebook (2005), Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain (2006), Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” in English Poetry (2009), Mozart in Anglophone Cultures (2009), and Sound Is/As Sense (2016, with David Malcolm).
Ludmiła Gruszewska‐Blaim is associate professor of English and American literature at the University of Gdańsk. She specializes in cultural semiotics, (post)modernist poetics, and utopian studies. She is the author and (co)editor of books on twentieth‐ and twenty‐first century literature and cinema. Her book publications on poetry include Visions and Re‐visions in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry (1996; in Polish); Essays on Modern British and Irish Poetry (2005; coedited with David Malcolm); Here/Now—Then/There: Traditions, Memory, Innovation in Modern British and Irish Poetry (2011; coedited with David Malcolm).
Małgorzata Grzegorzewska is a professor in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. Her principal research interests lie in Shakespeare studies, Renaissance poetry, and the interrelations of drama, verse, and metaphysical and theological concerns.
Robert Hampson is professor of modern literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. During the 1970s, he coedited the poetry magazine Alembic. He coedited New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester UP, 1993); Frank O’Hara Now (Liverpool UP, 2010); Clasp: Late Modernist Poetry in London in the 1970s (Shearsman Books, 2016); and The Salt Companion to Allen Fisher (with cris cheek, Shearsman Books, 2019). His collection of poems, Reworked Disasters (KFS, 2013), was long‐listed for the Forward Prize.
Ralf Hertel is a professor of English literature at the University of Trier, Germany. He is the author of Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (Brill Rodopi, 2005) and coeditor of Performing National Identity: Anglo‐Italian Cultural Transactions (with Manfred Pfister, Brill, 2008) and On John Berger: Telling Stories (with David Malcolm, Brill Rodopi, 2015).
Peter Hughes is a poet, painter, and the founding editor of Oystercatcher Press. He was born in Oxford in 1956, based in Italy for many years, and now lives on the Norfolk coast. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, which include Nistanimera, The Sardine Tree, The Summer of Agios Dimitrios, Behoven, and The Pistol Tree Poems. Nathan Thompson has described the latter as “flickering, intense, innovative and utterly mesmerizing.”
Peter Hühn was for many years a professor of British studies at the University of Hamburg. His principal interests include: English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Modernism, Yeats, and contemporary poetry. He has also worked extensively in the field of narratology. His current research projects include: concepts of plot in the British and American crime novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, in particular, the popular genre in the twentieth century; contemporary British and Irish poetry, postmodernist tendencies. A recent publication is Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry (De Gruyter, 2016).
Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, who lectures in English at the University of Łódz. He has published 12 volumes of poetry, 13 critical books on contemporary Irish, British, and American literature and has written extensively for various journals, including Poetry Review, Irish Review, and Cambridge Review. He is the editor of the literary monthly Literatura na Świecie (Warsaw) and has translated the work of many novelists and poets, including James Joyce, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, and Edmund White. His most recent works include two anthologies: Szesc Poetek Irlandzkich – Six Irish Women Poets (Biuro Literackie, 2012) and Poetki z Wysp –Women Poets from Britain (Biuro Literackie, 2015), which he selected and translated.
David Kennedy was senior lecturer in English and creative writing at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. He researched modern and contemporary poetry in English with special interests in elegy, ekphrasis, and experimental writing. He published articles in English, Irish Studies Review, and Textual Practice. He is the author of Necessary Steps: Poetry, Elegy, Walking, Spirit (Shearsman Books, 2007) and The Ekphrastic Encounter
in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Ashgate, 2012), and he is the coauthor of Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale (Liverpool UP, 2013). David Kennedy died in 2017.
Monika Kocot is assistant professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Łódz, Poland. Her academic interests include: contemporary Scottish poetry, Native American prose and poetry, literary theory, literary criticism, and translation. She is the author of Playing Games of Sense in Edwin Morgan’s Writing (Peter Lang, 2016) and coeditor of Języki (pop)kultury w literaturze, mediach i filmie (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2015). She is a member of the Association for Cultural Studies, the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, and the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association. She is the President of the K. K. Baczyński Literary Society.
Jessika Köhler is a lecturer in English literature, specializing in Irish studies, at the University of Hamburg and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She is currently researching space and place in contemporary Irish poetry.
Tim Liardet is a professor of poetry at Bath Spa University, England, and a Poetry Book Society selector. Twice shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, for The World Before Snow (Carcanet) in 2015 and The Blood Choir (Seren) in 2006, Tim Liardet has produced 10 collections of poetry to date. He has also been long‐listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and has received several Poetry Book Society Recommendations, a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, an Arts Council England Writer’s Award, a Society of Authors Award, and a Hawthornden fellowship. His most recent collection is Arcimboldo’s Bulldog: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2018).
Jo Lindsay Walton took his Master’s degree in social and political theory at Birkbeck, and is completing a PhD in creative writing at Northumbria University on finance and speculative fiction. His publications include the novel Invocation (Critical Documents, 2013). He coedits the poetry reviews journal Hix Eros and the poetry micropress Sad Press.
David Malcolm is a professor of English at SWPS University of Humanities and Social Sciences in Warsaw. He previously taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Gdansk. He has published extensively on British and Irish fiction and poetry. His translations of Polish and German literature have been published in Europe, the UK, and the USA. He is co-organizer of the Between.Pomiedzy Festival of Literature and Theatre which has been held annually in Sopot, Poland, since 2010.
Erik Martiny has taught Anglophone literature, art, and film in Cork, Aix‐en‐Provence, Saint‐Germain‐en‐Laye, and Paris. He currently teaches preparatory school students at the Lycée Henri‐IV in Paris. His work has focused on literature and the visual arts. His articles appear in the TLS, The London Magazine, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and The Cambridge Quarterly. His book on the poetics of filiation, Intertextualité et filiation paternelle
dans la poésie anglophone, was published in 2008. He has also written on the connections between film and fiction, having edited a volume of essays, Lolita: From Nabokov to Kubrick and Lyne (Editions Sedes, 2009). He also edited A Companion to Poetic Genre. His debut novel The Pleasures of Queueing (Mastodon Publishing) came out in 2018.
Will May is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Stevie Smith and Authorship (OUP, 2010) and Postwar Literature: 1950–1990 (Longman, 2010), and editor of The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (Faber, 2015) and the essay collection Reading F. T. Prince (Liverpool UP, 2015). He is currently writing a history of whimsy in Anglo‐American poetry.
Jennifer Militello has produced three collections of poetry with Tupelo Press, A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (2016), Body Thesaurus (2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, and Flinch of Song (2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, as well as the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail (Finishing Line, 2006). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
Alex Pestell’s study Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason was published by Peter Lang in 2016. He has edited John Wilkinson’s Schedule of Unrest: Selected Poems (Salt, 2014) and written on Pound, Williams, Bunting, and Zukofsky. He lives in Berlin.
Marc Porée is professor of English literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (PSL). As a romanticist, he has published numerous articles and chapters on the major Romantic poets. He also writes on British contemporary fiction and/or poetry and translates from English into French (Lord Byron, Joseph Conrad, Thomas de Quincey, Ann Radcliffe, R. L. Stevenson), chiefly for Gallimard. He occasionally contributes to the online review En Attendant Nadeau
Glyn Pursglove retired from his position as a reader in English at Swansea University in 2015. He has published many books and articles on English poetry from the seventeenth century to the present. His most recent book was Oro Espanõl: Traducciones Inglesas de Poesía Espanõla de los Siglos Diecisés y Diecisiete (Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid, 2014).
Stephen Regan is professor of English at Durham University, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. He is the author of two books on Philip Larkin, and he has written extensively on the work of W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and other Irish poets. His essays on modern poetry have appeared in The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth‐Century English Poetry (2008), and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). He is editor of Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789–1939 (Oxford UP, 2004), and also edited the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of George Moore’s Esther Waters (Oxford UP, 2012).
Alan Riach is professor of Scottish literature at Glasgow University, general editor of the collected works of Hugh MacDiarmid, author of Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography (2004) and coauthor of Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2009), described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a landmark book,” Arts of Independence: The Cultural Argument and Why It Matters Most (2014), and Arts and the Nation (2017). His books of poems include Homecoming (2009) and The Winter Book (both Luath Press, 2017).
Lacy Rumsey is associate professor of English at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He has published extensively on British and American poetry, with a particular focus on rhythm. Recent essays include a reassessment of the free‐verse prosody of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an analysis of the meters of Louis MacNeice’s The Burning Perch, and studies of contemporary British poets R. F. Langley and Jeff Hilson. He is currently completing a book on the prosody of free verse.
Martin Ryle is emeritus reader in English at the University of Sussex. His research interests include twentieth‐century Irish writing in English, and he has published articles on Paul Muldoon, John McGahern, and Derek Mahon. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of Green Letters
Pilar Sánchez Calle is senior lecturer of English and American Literature at the University of Jaén, Spain. Her research focuses on contemporary English and North American literature, with special emphasis on the representation of gender, identity, and exile. Some of her publications include “No City of God: Urban Images in the Fiction of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset,” “Private Dreams, Public Realities: An Analysis of Female Characters in Ronald Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot,” and “The Artist as a Mongrel Girl: Mina Loy’s Anglo‐Mongrels and the Rose.”
Robert Sheppard’s two main literary critical works are The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool UP, 2005) and The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave, 2016), though he has written a monograph on Iain Sinclair and edited a companion to the work of Lee Harwood. His poetry is partly collected in Complete Twentieth Century Blues (Salt, 2008) and selected in History or Sleep (2015), from Shearsman, who publish other works, including the collaboratively written volume of fictional poetry, Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (2017). He lives and writes in Liverpool, United Kingdom, and is emeritus professor of poetry and poetics at Edge Hill University.
John Sparrow is a poet and digital artist. He is interested in materiality and the use of forms as rhetorical devices, particularly as they relate to live performance, modular and reflexive writing, and generative texts. He likes to explore texts whose compositions are affected by external influences, and allow for chance and random processes to infiltrate the
writing process. He is currently completing a PhD in generative digital poetics. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife and cats.
Eleanor Spencer teaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where she is also Vice Principal and senior tutor at St. Chad’s College. She was previously a Frank Knox Memorial fellow at Harvard University, and is the editor of the New Casebooks on American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Monika Szuba is lecturer in English literature at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her research, which mainly focuses on twentieth and twenty‐first century poetry, is informed by environmental humanities and phenomenological perspectives. She is the editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (University of Gdańsk Press, 2015) and coeditor, with Julian Wolfreys, of The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave, 2019). She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh UP, 2020).
Scott Thurston is reader in English and creative writing at the University of Salford. A poet and critic, he has written several volumes of poetry and published widely on innovative writing. He edited The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (2007) and compiled a book of interviews with innovative poets called Talking Poetics (Shearsman Books, 2011). Thurston also coedits the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co‐organizes The Other Room poetry reading series in Manchester.
Juha Virtanen is lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Kent. His monograph, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980: Event and Effect, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. His own poetry publications include Back Channel Apraxia (Contraband, 2014) and –LAND (Oystercatcher Press, 2016). He coedits DATABLEED together with Eleanor Perry.
Jean Ward is an associate professor at the Institute of English and American Studies of Gdańsk University, Poland. She specializes in religious poetry, is the author of Christian Poetry in the Post‐Christian Day: Geoffrey Hill, R. S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings (Peter Lang, 2009), has contributed to collections of critical essays both in English and in Polish, on Jennings’s poetics and her relationship with other poets, including George Herbert, G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones.
Daniel Weston is senior lecturer of English literature at the University of Greenwich. His monograph, Contemporary Literary Landscapes: The Poetics of Experience , was published by Ashgate in 2017. He has published work on modern and contemporary poetry, prose fiction, and non‐fiction, with particular emphasis on literary geographies and place writing.
David Wheatley is a reader in English and creative writing at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet, 2017), and the author of the critical study Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2014). He has also edited the poetry of James Clarence Mangan (2003) and of Samuel Beckett (2009), for Gallery Press and Faber and Faber, respectively.
Tomasz Wis niewski was for several years the Deputy Director for Research in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk. He is a cofounder of the Between.Pomie dzy Festival, and the founder of the Beckett Research Group in Gdan sk. He has published Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and a monograph on Samuel Beckett (Universitas, 2006). He is a member of the editorial board of the global portal The Theatre Times and the literary quarterly Tekstualia
Bartosz Wójcik is a translator, literary critic, and cultural manager. He has published scholarly papers on the works of, among others, Patience Agbabi, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kei Miller, Mutabaruka, Michael Smith, and Derek Walcott. He is the author of Afro‐Caribbean Poetry in English: Cultural Traditions (Peter Lang, 2015) and works at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin, Poland (spotkaniakultur.com).
Preface
With such a long, multi‐authored book on such a complex and provocative subject, editors of necessity feel that the reader deserves a few words of explanation before he/she starts to read it.
In our choice of topics and poets, we have been guided by what we felt to be important and useful. We are well aware that another two editors would have approached the field quite differently. We have aimed to open up contemporary British and Irish poetry to a variety of readers in order to give them some sense of the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that make up these two distinct but interrelated poetries.
We have encouraged the authors of the essays in this volume to shape their contributions as they thought best. As readers of poetry, we have a fondness, inter alia, for technical analysis of rhythm, meter, and sound. Not all the authors share this interest to the same degree, although all their analyses and interpretations are well‐grounded in the textual material of the poetry they discuss. Such diversity is as it should be. Further, we have allowed authors a latitude in the length of their essays. Some contributions are more concise than others. However, we insisted that the extent of the longer essays be justified in terms of the complexity and interest of the subjects that they address. Further, several essays are provocative and do not bow to established pieties. Again, surely, this is as it should be.
The volume has been several years in preparation. As a result, while we have tried to make sure it is as up‐to‐date as possible, some poets in the meantime may have published additional poems, and commentators published new studies. But this is an inevitable part of discourse in modern and contemporary literary studies.
Readers will be struck by the absence of separate essays on some well‐known and outstanding poets. Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Geoffrey Hill are obvious examples, as is Carol Ann Duffy. We felt that the world did not need another separate essay on Larkin or Heaney, for instance. But a glance at the list of contents and the index to this volume will show that such celebrated poets (eximious within an
extravagance of writers) appear continually throughout the volume in discussions of wider issues. In the essays on individual writers, we have chosen poets who deserve greater individual prominence than they have achieved hitherto, or writers who are emerging as major poetic voices.
From a personal perspective, we note with sadness the death of one of our contributors, the gifted poet and critic David Kennedy. In addition, we thank D. M. de Silva for his advice. We also thank the editorial team at Wiley‐Blackwell for their patience and support.
Wolfgang Görtschacher
David Malcolm
SECTION 1
Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse
Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse
Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm
Introduction
The story is a well‐known one, and this volume presents it in individual essays. The Movement. Alvarez’s The New Poetry. The Liverpool poets. The Northern Irish. The British Poetry Revival. The Martians. Linguistically innovative poetry. Black British poetry. Women’s poetry. Gay and lesbian voices. The abiding forces of regional poetry. American models. The stars: Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Paul Muldoon, and Carol Ann Duffy.
It occurred to us that we could retell that story here. But it had been told so often, and is told, we believe—with much else besides (thematic and genre‐ and technique‐centered essays, essays on writers within and without any obviously stellar grouping)—in the span of pieces contained in this volume. We felt we should do something different.
Our premises are twofold. First, the best and fullest engagement with poetry is an engagement, above all, with individual poems. Second—and this is, to a degree, a corollary of the first premise—this engagement involves an analysis and interpretation of what we would call technique, that is, the formal properties of a piece of verse. These properties include line length, stress placement, meter, and a panoply of phonological features (rhyme and other sound effects). These we conceive to be integral to the meaning of a poem, as much as—and in conjunction with—thematic reference and imbrication in the historical and social contexts. These premises have guided the organization of the introduction.
A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960–2015, First Edition. Edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm.
It consists of three parts. In the first, we suggest that a great deal of modern criticism of poetry does everything in its power to avoid speaking about technical aspects of any piece or body of verse. We are not sure why, except that it is probably easier to maunder on impressionistically about the topics of a piece of verse as Fiona Sampson does than to sit down and actually analyze a poem. We contend, however, that if you do not analyze and interpret technique, you are at best only doing half your job. Thus, the second part of this opening chapter contains brief analyses of 20 poems of substance from the period embraced by this collection. Restrictions of available space limit how much we can do in any analysis. We have adopted a minimum technique of analysis, which has the merit of being accessible. We hope readers can see the general principles underlying our approach. We contend that this set of analyses offers some interesting insights into how British and Irish poetries are configured in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Our discussions perhaps allow a slightly different—and complementary—story to the traditional one. It certainly brings with it some unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, third, we offer some general remarks on British and Irish poetry in the period.
1.
It is, of course, very difficult to prove an absence.1 However, let us suggest that although the contemporary discussion of contemporary poetry is complex and valuable, there is a tendency to avoid the technical. There is a disposition among commentators to talk of the contextual and the thematic, but not what one might call the formal or the technical aspects of poetry. Let us present some examples.
Here Martin Booth writes about Thom Gunn’s poetry in British Poetry 1964 to 1984 (1985).
Gunn wrote with an urgency that was appropriate to the times. This gained him few readers. What got him far more and was to extend his reputation were his poems that were about matters close to the common heart. Lorry drivers, “rockers” in leather jackets, Elvis Presley, death and, in more recent books, homosexuality and drugs. (226–227)
The topical focus (a correct one, surely, let it be noted) is evident here, as it is in Michael Schmidt’s earlier A Reader’s Guide to Fifty Modern British Poets (1979), in a comment on Roy Fuller’s poetry.
His landscape is finally not Africa but suburbia where, as in the war poems, and sometimes with equal power, he celebrates arrivals, departures, the long ennui. (250)
Here, however, justice compels one to note that Schmidt, elsewhere in this important study, alludes, if fleetingly, to formal aspects of texts. For example, he writes of Fuller’s defense of “threatened forms and values” (245), and of Gunn’s use of “strict form and literary idiom,” in contradistinction to his (Gunn’s) poems’ subject matters (378). One should also note Schmidt’s ringing assertion in Reading Modern Poetry (1989):
The abiding meaning of any poem is a function of technical properties –whether deliberately or accidentally achieved – which give it life beyond its occasion and its “ideas.” (56)
While the point could scarcely be made better, one is compelled to note that a lot of Schmidt’s practice in his books is not much guided by it, at least not thoroughly or consistently.
Chapter 4 of David Kennedy’s insightful and important book New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry, 1980–1994 (1996) deals, at least in part, with Peter Reading’s engagement with meter and form (120–153), but such a technique‐oriented approach is not typical of the study. More representative is his Chapter 5, entitled “The Noise of Science,” which focuses on poets’ engagement with scientific subjects and scientific lexis (which can be seen as part of a formal concern) (153–184). A representative quotation from Keith Tuma’s Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (1998) is the following on Peter Riley’s work. “The ontological concerns of Riley’s poems,” Tuma writes, “might call for glosses from any number of modern philosophers,” such as Heidegger and Merleau‐Ponty (219). It is not our intent to suggest that such a perspective is wrong, but to note that it certainly does not seem to see the formal or technical properties of Riley’s verse as meaning‐bearing or integral to any analysis or interpretation—or at least, not in any explicit manner.
The topical focus of much commentary on contemporary poetry is also apparent in Fiona Sampson’s study Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (2012). For example, she writes the following about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Prayer”:
“Prayer” […] offers a redemptive view of the suburbs. It suggests that their particular vision of the quotidian, evoked as a child practicing scales and the shipping forecast of the radio, could offer transcendence. (123)
It would be hard to tell from this (and this passage is representative of the way Sampson discusses verse) whether the critic is dealing with a poem, an essay, or a short story (one only knows it is not a novel because the title is not in italics). Even when there is an acknowledgement that form is important, the reference is superficial. The following is a comment on the poet Ahren Warner. He is,
on the page at least, a brainy flâneur who seems to have emerged fully formed. Already fascinated by, and thinking through, broken poetic forms and continental philosophy when he was still in his teens, Warner is no scholarly postmodernist mumbling to himself. His is an engaged, boulevardier’s voice. He may allude to philosophers and their ideas but […] does so simply because this material is within range of a well‐stocked mind. His light touch with such material can be deliciously witty. (206–207)
What are these “broken poetic forms,” one wants to ask? One notes no mention of the substance of verse here—line length, line breaks, rhythm, meter, and sound. What is the use of this impressionistic insubstantiality? Such comments as mentioned earlier are more disappointing because Sampson insists that her book is concerned with the “craft” that “poem‐making largely involves” (280–281). It is not clear where the author
Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm deals with “craft” as we would understand the term. In justice, it has to be said that elsewhere Sampson does concern herself with something like “craft.” For example, in the special numbers of Agenda (Spring/Summer 2011) devoted to John Burnside’s poetry, she does discuss rhythmic aspects of his verse, along with sentence length, stanza and line breaks, and phonological aspects of his texts (115–118). However, the conclusions she draws from such analysis are impressionistic and subjective, and opaque. Burnside’s poetry has “an accelerated, slippery tunefulness” (114), and he belongs to a “school of expanded lyricists” (119). It is very hard to know what Sampson means by either comment.
There is no excuse for such ignoring of the technical. A wide range of approaches to formal and technical aspects of verse is available to the contemporary commentator. Indeed, some have been available for a long time. Geoffrey Leech’s great A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969) is still very helpful in any discussion of poetry. Marina Tarlinskaja’s English Verse: Theory and History dates from 1976. The first edition of Harvey Gross’s and Robert McDowell’s fine Sound and Form in Modern Poetry appeared in 1964 (the second edition dates from 1996). The following is just a selection of more recent texts that seem particularly useful in the matter of analysis and interpretation of poetry:
Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm (1995)
Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (1996)
David Baker, ed., Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996)
Timothy Steele, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing (1999)
Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle, Meter in Poetry: A New Theory (2008)
Martin Duffell, A New History of English Metre (2008)
Christoph Küper, ed., Current Trends in Metrical Analysis (2011)
Not all of these are easy books to read, nor are the systems of analysis they propose entirely (or at all) compatible with each other. But they are there, and they propose ways of analyzing verse that pay due attention to the specifics of the poetic text. Gross and McDowell (1996) lay down the challenge to those who would talk about poetry:
We venture that rhythmic structure neither ornaments conceptual meaning nor provides a sensuous element extraneous to meaning: prosody is a symbolic structure like metaphor and carries its own weight of meaning. (2–3)
Our view is that meter, and prosody in general, is itself meaning. Rhythm is neither outside a poem’s meaning nor an ornament to it. (10)
In his essay “A Return to Form” (2008), Derek Attridge notes what he sees as a return to formal concerns in literary studies, after a dominance of (useful and illuminating) historical and culture‐focused approaches to literature over the preceding 30 years. “Since 2005,” he writes, “the signs of a revitalization of formal study have multiplied” (565). Attridge has reservations about some recent returns to form (for example, those undertaken by Terry Eagleton, Tom Paulin, and Helen Vendler), on the grounds of lack of consistency and accuracy. But he welcomes a concern with technique, indeed, a concern
Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse 7
wi th form, a renewed attention to the “formal analysis” (573) that is the poem. He argues that such an approach is ethically appropriate, but is also accurate, grounded, and appropriate in literary studies. One should note that Attridge is certainly not arguing for a disregard of topic or reference to extratextual context. He is, however, urging that a good reading is one that also considers textual configurations, shapings, and substances. Such an interest in technique and form is also illustrated by Angela Leighton’s illuminating On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (2007), which charts some of the vicissitudes of formalist and neoformalist approaches to the literary text.
2.
Here are analyses of 20 poems that we feel to be of substance from the period 1960 through 2015. The poems are discussed in chronological order. They are poems by well‐known and less well‐known poets.
Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb” (1964) (Larkin 1964, 45–46)
The title of this poem is immediately striking. Why the indefinite article? Is it one tomb among many? Are there other examples of such tombs, with the meanings added by the poem? Further, the title refers to a documented monument, and the text itself offers an accurate description of it, except for the assertion that “little dogs” lie at the feet of the couple. A dog lies at the feet of the woman, a lion at the feet of the man.
The subject matter is clearly and rationally set forth over seven stanzas of the same length: the tomb is described (stanzas 1 and 2); the speaker’s response and direct reflection are given (stanzas 2–5); general reflection on time, change, and endurance follows (stanzas 6–7). An act of observation and reflection on the part of the speaker is recorded, but that act is consistently impersonal (line 8: “the eye”; line 11: “one sees”; line 42: “us”). Order and consistency are embodied in technical aspects of the text. Each stanza contains six lines. All lines are eight syllables in length. The rhyme scheme is largely consistent (abbcac). Iambs and diambs dominate in the poem. All such features are appropriate in a text that celebrates traditional married love, unity in death, and the survival of a feudal and aristocratic past.
However, this poem is also a technically disordered piece. For example, while iambs and diambs dominate stanza 1, several other feet are prominent (amphibrachs and amphimacers). Lines 5 and 6 both end in four beat feet that can only be construed as diambs with some difficulty, and are best understood as fourth paeons (xxx/). In addition, foot divisions are uncertain at the ends of lines 2, 3, and 4. Are these amphimacers or in line 2 a single‐stress foot followed by an iamb, and in lines 3 and 4 trochees followed by single‐stressed feet? In a poem about unity, isolated single stresses carry a contestatory semantic weight, while in a poem about tradition and order, metrical irresolution is surely disruptive. In fact, several lines can only be scanned as iambic if the reader places the values of the metronome
Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm
over natural speech, for example, stanza 3, line 5 and stanza 7, line 5. Further, the first lines of stanzas 6 and 7 both contain metrically monstrous feet: “at their identity” (xxx/xx) and “has transfigured them into” (xx/xxxx)—although other scansions are possible.
Further disorder can be seen in phonological patterning, which in this poem is always local, and in a rhyme scheme that does fracture on occasion, for example, the anisobaric rhymes in lines 10 and 12, and in lines 14 and 15. This is particularly clear in the last, seemingly triumphant stanza: lines 37 and 41 (“into / true”) and lines 38 and 39 (“fidelity / to be”). It is surely important that the concluding “love” does not actually rhyme fully with the preceding “prove.” In addition, in a poem celebrating unity, the persistent recurrence of enjambment (11 examples, plus the radical enjambment between stanzas 4 and 5) must disturb. One can also notice a further degree of uncertainty in the poem’s puns: inter alia “proper habits” (line 3), “faithfulness in effigy” (line 14), and “blazon” (line 40). Paronomasia disrupts as much as enjambment: things are not what they seem.
Attention to technique reveals a much more ambiguous poem than a superficial reading brings. “Untruth” and disorder become as important as the survival of tradition and “love.” What appears as a celebration of tradition becomes something much more questioning and fragmentary. Are there other such monuments, English history incarnate, seemingly solid and unambiguous, that reveal themselves as complex and ambiguous?
Lee Harwood, “The Sinking Colony” (1968–1969) (Harwood 2004, 153–155)
Ambiguity in history is central to Harwood’s poem. Title and epigraph enact the equivoque of the rest of the poem. What is the sinking colony? Is the end and insubstantial nature of empire announced by it? Why is the epigraph a quotation from a translation of André Gide’s Les Faux‐monnayeurs? Is the factitious nature of any account signaled from the very start?
The poem itself is a designedly broken thing, the meaning of which—apart from brokenness—must remain unclear. It is divided into six sections. Sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 are in prose, without any obvious phonological or rhythmic patterning. A majority of sentences are without terminal punctuation (12 out of 21). Section 2 also contains three lines of broken verse (six noncohesive phrases, with a space between each of the first pair and the second pair). Section 4 consists of verse, but the lines are irregular in length (from 14 to 4 syllables) and in numbers of main stresses per line (from 7 to 2). It is very hard to see any traditional metrical patterning. The same is the case with the verse in section 6.
The speaker in the six sections is unstable: an “I” and a “we.” Although all sections have narrative elements, there is no coherent narrative over the whole poem, and any narrative in any single section is elliptical and incomplete. Section 1 is set in British India. Section 2 refers to mountains and foothills, but whether these are those of section 1 is not clear. Similarly, the rains mentioned in section 3 may or may not be Indian rains. Are mansion, crops, and rain in section 4 those of earlier sections? Are they Indian or English? Old or modern? Section 5 shifts unambiguously to another part of the Empire, to Canada, and to another kind of weather. Section 6 with its violence may follow on from section 5, although one cannot be sure. The gate recurs here, although it is hard to see why there is a gate in a Canadian clearing.
Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse 9
However, there are elements of coherence in the text. The verse is not quite as disordered as it seems. The last four lines of section 4 contain two quasi‐end rhymes (“alternating / skipping,” “days / face”), and other lines end in echoes (“grounds / storms,” “machinery / dry”). The same intermittent semi‐rhyme is notable in section 6: (“shot / knots / padlock,” “all this / in this”). A certain framework is offered by the recurrent motifs of rain, gate, crops, and mansion. Action, too, occurs in central parts of the British Empire (India and Canada). Two expeditions are referred to, in sections 1 and 5.
Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that fragmentariness and a concomitant obscurity mark the poem. History (events, accounts) is a matter of incomplete and inconclusive narratives, impressions (section 4), and reflections (section 3). Unease is recurrent: the speaker in section 1 has limited possibilities; the speaker in section 2 is “unnerved”; section 3 is entitled “The ache?”; there is a “sigh” and “pain” in section 4; there is violence and “little comfort” in section 6. There are hints of coherence (mentioned earlier), but mostly “There were complexities” (section 3) and, as the speaker has it in section 5, “I cannot work it out.” Empire—England?—is fragmented; the colonial power is sinking.
Heaney, “Requiem for the Croppies” (1966) (Heaney 1990, 12)
The title of the poem unambiguously announces a defiance of empire, and goes on to offer precisely what the title announces—a laudatory dirge for Irish rebels. Strikingly, this threnody for insurrection is enacted within a metropolitan and traditional English‐language genre, for the requiem is a sonnet, albeit one that deviates from traditional established models. Such deviation occurs on several levels. This sonnet is a narrative sonnet, not a lyric expression of feeling. The speaker is plural, not the traditional singular one. Subject matter does not quite fit the traditional octave/sestet division. Lines 1–4 form a focused quatrain, but the next subject (the Croppies’ tactics) runs from line 5 to line 9. The remaining five lines are, thus, a decapitated sestet. Lines are mostly 10 syllables long, although six lines are longer, and lines 9, 10, 11, and 14 are considerably longer. The numbers of main stresses per line are also variable (from three to six), and the last line can legitimately be read as having between four and six main stresses. The poem certainly has iambic elements, and anywhere between six and eight feet can be scanned as iambs or diambs. But six, and possibly seven, feet are trochees or ditrochees. There are several rather long feet: for example, “through reins and rider” (line 7) should probably be scanned x/x/x; “cattle into infantry” (line 8)—/xxx/xx; and “in our broken wave” (line 12)—xx/x/. Six lines end in an unstressed syllable.
Rhyme is disruptive. The rhyme scheme template itself—abab cdcd efe efe—is not that of an established sonnet template. Further, 6 out of 14 lines end in a questionable rhyme: “barley / country” (1, 3), “infantry / day” (6, 8), “cannon / thrown / coffin” (9, 11, 13), and “conclave / wave / grave” (10, 12, 14). In this last sequence, “wave / grave” is a full rhyme, but “conclave” rhymes anisobarically with both.
The poem is an elegy for rebellion and a smack in the face to established authority. The sonnet tradition (high status, metropolitan, relatively rigid) is appropriated and undermined, perhaps by a folk tradition with its narrative celebration of outlaws and rebels and
