I am currently reading a collection of poems which are all well crafted, lyrical, ‘poetic’. Focussing on a limited palette in terms of theme – the natural world, the impact of lockdown, solitude – they all pretty much hit the mark; when you turn the page, as a reader you know what you’re going to get.
Which is all fine, isn’t it?
Yet when I finish reading one of these poems increasingly my reaction is ‘so what?’ Apart from diverting me for a minute or two, has the poem moved me in any way or made ‘a difference’? If I hadn’t read it – or, indeed, if it hadn’t been written – would my life be diminished in any way?
And it’s not just this book. More and more these days I find myself feeling a sense of deflation when I get to the end of a contemporary poem. Which begs a question, doesn’t it?
What is a poem for?
And this all comes back to why the poem has been written in the first place – and for whom it has been written.
The vast majority of poems – both ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ – are selfish endeavours, written by people for themselves in order to describe an experience or work something through. Writing such poetry is often self-medication or exorcism or therapy. You see this evidenced in contemporary single-theme collections where the poet is riffing on one subject, often ‘difficult’ or complex – and intensely personal.
Yes, those poems are more likely to resonate with people who have had – or are having – similar experiences, and undoubtedly some of the pieces will be very powerful, moving, exceptional. But when faced with poem after poem all about X or Y, I become alienated – which invariably means the ‘good stuff’ gets lost.
Of course there is nothing wrong in a poet writing for themselves, and to do so in order to resolve a personal issue, make their place in the world more secure, improve their feeling about themselves. We all do it, right?
But what about the reader?
I have no issue in someone using the unique power of poetry in order to explore their relationship with the world, to understand the lived experience. But publishers these days seem happy enough to foist collections lacking any outward perspective onto the reading public. (Carcanet are the publishers of the book I am currently reading – as they were of the previous one I read and which suffered from even greater ‘narrowness’.) As a reader I want to learnsomething along the way, to be moved, to find that individual’s experience unwrapped and made more universal; I want the poem to give me an alternative view on something.
“Tell the truth but tell it slant” – Emily Dickinson
Perhaps our ability to achieve this is gradually being lost in our increasingly ‘me-centric’ world where ‘worth’ is less about what we might do for others (e.g. inspire, move, educate our readers) and more about how we promote ourselves (e.g. cultivating likes and followers).
The modern-day poet is more likely to hold up a mirror to themselves than offer us a lens through which to see the world.
So who should a poet write for?
If your desire is to be read, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that you should be writing more for others than yourself; that the most important person in the transaction is the reader, not the poet.
If you want to write something that is so narrowly focussed that it only has meaning in relation to your own existence, then fine – but perhaps keep it to yourself.
However, right or wrong, this black-and-whiteness leaves me with a huge problem.
Firstly, what about my own poetry? Or at least my contemporary work. In my recent collection Grimsby Docks I have tried to use the poems to speak about urban decay, our relationship to history; I have attempted to see the fabric of the place as metaphor for the lived experience. And not my life, I hasten to add; there is nothing autobiographical in the book.
Have I succeeded? I can’t possibly say. Only readers of the collection are qualified to pass comment.
The second and much larger problem is this: if poetry has the power to move and educate, to protest and explain, but it does not do so, then what’s the point of it? Or of all the millions of poems written every year? The dozens of poems that will have been written while I have been typing this? All those bland Instagram-ready ditties…
The step between that somewhat existential position – “what’s the point” – to giving up poetry altogether is, in my case, I fear an increasingly narrowing one…
Ian Gouge - Writer 