I hear all the time that the thing we've got to do as poets is "get rid of the Academies". Take the Poem out of the hands of the ruling elite, I presume that means, and return it to "the streets". I have to confess I don't know where the Academies or the streets are--they're certainly not evident in my neck of the woods...........
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WHICH ONE OF YOU BASTARDS KILLED MY SEXY LAMB?
poetry and the academies in britain
by Bruce Hodder
I hear all the time that the thing we've got to do as poets is "get rid of the Academies". Take the Poem out of the hands of the ruling elite, I presume that means, and return it to "the streets". I have to confess I don't know where the Academies or the streets are--they're certainly not evident in my neck of the woods.
I don't know much about the American scene. I know a few American poets, but I guess I don't have enough of an overview to comment with real authority about what goes on over there. But I know about the British scene. Let's look at that for a few minutes and see how much what happens over here is reflected worldwide.
The rationale for this widespread belief that Academies are ruining poetry is guided by William Carlos Williams' early work searching for a language poetically that reflected the rhythms and patterns of ordinary speech better than iambic pentameter. Speech was changing but the techniques for writing poetry weren't, as Williams saw it. So using traditional verse tools seemed archaic, didn't provide the poet with a suitable vehicle for addressing the new century.
That was what Williams meant. He didn't mean that the poet could only validate his poetry by writing in a way that would be easily understood by the stereotypical--and probably non-existent--man in the street.
Which was understood by his lineal descendant and fellow New Jerseyite Allen Ginsberg, even if it has been misunderstood by legions of American and British poets since. Allen defined poetry as " intense (my italics) fragments of ordinary speech", and on one level his creative mission was as far away from the streets as it's possible to get. He had one eye on Heaven, until he became a Buddhist and realised there wasn't one.
It was Allen's poetry, really, that started the contemporary small press scene in the UK, with the success of "Howl" and "Kaddish". He and the rest of the Beats got a whole generation of talented young poets into writing, convincing them that it was a powerful and dynamic medium, that the inequities of the outmoded British social system could be exposed and overturned through it. But not in any political way. Allen in particular pointed young poets back to Blake, and to the more recent complexities of the still-hated Ezra Pound, whose densely-allusive Cantos were so learned (albeit in a slightly lunatic way) they showed British higher education for the conservative penny-meal it really was.
The poetry Establishment at the time wasn't giving us anything. Just the middle-brow pleasantries of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (who denounced the "three Ps of Modernism": Pound, Picasso and Parker). Even the meatier poets coming out of the universities, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, were almost too easy to read. Everybody liked 'em, except anybody who dreamed that there could be something more one day than grey suits on the bus and Sunday roasts and the Daily Mirror at tea break for the rest of your life.
By the time Allen Ginsberg played the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, with many of the bright young talents of the contemporary British poetry scene, the Sixties Poetry Renaissance--as commanded by Michael Horowitz, Lee Harwood, Harry Fainlight, Chris Torrance, Bill Wyatt and Dave Cunliffe--was already well underway. Some of the cleverer critics will tell you that by then it was already over; but there's always someone who tries to prove his smarts by taking the negative view. "Cynicism is intellectual dandyism."
What finally fucked up the first generation of new British poets was not the intolerable weight of its own intellectual/ social/ spiritual programme--the impossibility of liberating fusty old Britain into sexy nakedness--it was drugs, especially smack. And maybe the kind of furious energy and innovation they brought to the scene can't be sustained for too long anyway, without collapse. Wasn't it Blake himself, after all, who said that our capacity to experience the infinite had a human end?
2.
The British Academies--let's for aguments' sake presume that when people use such a woolly term, they mean the universities and the schools of thought they promote, which are taken into the serious newspapers and the big publishing houses when the students finally leave education with their degrees tucked under their arms--the British Academies were always boringly middle-brow, and they continued to be so when the wave broke and the Poetry Renaissance led by Torrance and Fainlight et al went back underground, where, presumably, it was supposed to belong. Everything the Academies turned out, and still turn out, is diluted Eliot or Larkin, the language and "ideas" (let's be temporarily generous), accessible to anybody who doesn't have to read with their tongue stuck out.
But what came along as a counterweight after the Renaissance faded?
Bukowski. Aahh, Bukowski, whose influence on British writers and poets has been immeasurable. Buk started out with a surrealistic edge to his poetry when he was making his name in the small press in the 60s; but by the time the wider reading public knew about him he had simplified his style somewhat--or at least his language. In his better known poetry he sounds like some kind of collision between Hemingway and Mickey Spillane. But at his best he is technically better than anyone realises.
Buk engages in this almost knee-jerk denunciation of the Academies everywhere in his poetry and letters, without really knowing what he's talking about. And his supporters, looking (strangely) for a way to justify him to the Establishment they claim to hate, cite W. C. Williams' call for a verse language that approximates ordinary speech and suggest in Bukowski the good Doctor's work is complete!
It is doubtful that Buk gave it that much thought, of course.
His weakness, in my opinion, is his sentimentality. He romanticises his own suffering, and the hard road he has travelled. In early letters he dismisses the writing of poets in literary journals because it haws no relevance to guys like himself sleeping on park benches. Well, so what? If it took a big man to suffer, pain probably wouldn't be a universal experience.
In his sentimentality, Buk insists that raw experience is the only legitimate criteria for worthwhile writing (and remember, he hung out with college professors, albeit guilt-ridden liberal ones). And that has been swallowed wholesale--if you can swallow something wholesale--by a lot of poets in Britain (and America), and used as an excuse not even to read Blake and Basil Bunting and Pound and Hart Crane, all those others you can't really avoid if you want to develop a mature poetical sensibility. They must be avoided, in the post-Buk age, because they are "of the Academies", except of course they aren't and they never were--not in Britain anyway. The Academies were always too philistine to understand them.
Now all these poets want to write about is getting drunk and fucking, because that's "real life", and therefore artistically valid. As if real life and art were mutually masturbating Siamese twins. Ginsberg's "revolution of the sexy lamb" seems a long way off indeed.
Now British poets on the counter-cultural side, under the delusion that they are saying something more interesting/ exciting/ "relevant" (a useless and ugly word), than poets belonging to a body whose existence hasn't even been conclusively proven (the Academy), are producing writing that says nothing, goes nowhere and challenges no one. It just holds a mirror up to everyday experience. And half the editors (not me), are leaping on their booze and whores poems as if they were tablets from the gods.
This is my humble opinion anyway--albeit I am writing with a picture of Allen Ginsberg on my desk and several volumes of Ezra Pound piled up in the armchair behind me (just to declare where I stand). Oh, I also have a gutful of dissatisfaction that comes from watching technically bad work done by me and countless others eaten up like Belgian chocolate just because we got the content right.
The mission of future poets, as far as I can see, is not to get rid of the Academies, if they exist, but to free ourselves (and everybody else) from what Tom Robbins called "the tyranny of the dull mind". That is, the mind that follows the herd; the mind that accepts without asking awkward questions; the mind that is content to look at surfaces and never wonders what's beneath. This is needed even if all you want to do is write interesting verse. But if you believe, as Blake and Shelley and Ginsberg did, that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the race", and we all do, really--that's why we presume to show other people the truth, whatever we think it is--we're certainly going to have to deliver more than polite breakdown in a reading room (that's the poetry of the Academies), or wig-out with a Wild Turkey bottle in a back alley in the rain (that's the small press in these parts).
In the archetypal words of the weary traveller: tell us something we don't know, in our trembling flesh. Then we might all stand a chance of getting out of this lousy fix we're in "here down on dark Earth/ before we all go to Heaven," as another great believer in the lamb once said.
Last update : 23-09-2007 20:47
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