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Poetry as power quest? The poet as healer and shaman?
America, home to the Navajo and their haunting Night Chants, still offers
this possibility for poetry. Whatever literary movements are happening
there, there is also this tradition, which we don't have here, and maybe
that's why British poetic realism can sometimes seem pedestrian. Could
Galway Kinnell have written 'The Bear' here? I doubt it. No such problem
in Ireland or Wales though, where myth and the Celtic past are still an
influence.
So I went to New York for some relief from the constraints of British
poetry. Excited by our current scene, but fed up with the dominant empirical
approach, the unrelenting realism, the tightness and neatness and smallness
of form, the timidity, gentility, the politeness of subject-matter, the
avoidance of myth and fantasy. I looked to America for experiment, risk
— more magical ways of writing in English. I wanted to publish more
Americans in Poetry London, mix them in, shake things up. "American
poets?" An English friend suggested, "so much more playful than
us, so expansive and free."
Then a New Yorker, reading Poetry London, told me: "The trouble
with a lot of new American poets is they're homogenised by the MFA courses".
She picked out several poets from our autumn issue and found them more
individual by comparison. " They're so original and playful and fresh,"
she said.
The US magazine Poets & Writers is currently carrying a series of
debates overviewing US poetry. High on the agenda is the effect of the
Master of Fine Art courses, ubiquitous in America, where most successful
poets teach, and the majority of new poets graduate. During my recent
visit to New York, many young poets thrust their first collections into
my hands. I was dismayed at the sheer sameness of the work in them. I
often could not distinguish one voice or music from another.
I came away with a more sympathetic appreciation of British poetry, where
would-be poets are always urged to be original, to find their own voice,
to be distinct and stand out. Certainly, when selecting work from emerging
writers for this magazine, that is one of the key qualities we're looking
for — a distinct and therefore memorable voice.
But America is huge. And despite the arguably homogenising effect of
some MFA courses on emerging poets, everything that I look to America
for is also there, alongside the mediocre work. There isn't such variety
here in the UK. We have maybe only one poetry camp, one set of prizes
and endorsements, one fashionable clique. And America is a continent that
is also home to Native Americans. The Navajo Nightway chants with their
incantatory haunting beauty, ghost Walt Whitman's lines. I can even see
traces threaded in Sharon Olds' poems in this issue. In the poem 'Animal
Dress', "her dress / like a zodiac", has that elemental reach
of the Navajo 'War God's Horse Song': "My horse with eyes made of
big stars. / My horse with a head made of mixed waters…" or
the ninth Night Chant — 'House Made of Dawn', where matter, even
though described as matter, moves from the empirical to the revelatory.
The British aversion to strong emotion (clothe it in irony or don't let
it show at all) is also blissfully absent in many US poets' work. Though
I did discover the downside of this: in many cases, emotion slips into
sentimentality, which would not be tolerated here. There are British poets
whose poems are rhapsodic, but they are not very fashionable — major
talents such as Peter Redgrove (lives in Cornwall), Robert Minhinnick
(Wales), Eamon Grennan (lives in New York, but from Dublin), come to mind.
There are English poets who break out of the realist, empirical strictures
— Selima Hill for one, but they are rare. Half of the poems in this
issue are from the US, half are from the British Isles. I hope they sing
to one another. There's much these two Englishes can learn from each other.
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