In the expansive and marvelous new conversation between Valerie Witte & Aidan Semmens (now complete), Witte’s first poem is witty and tense, putting minor and major disasters, including the threat of flood, alongside one another in the form of a missive. In his response, Semmens introduces 18th-Century natural philosopher Allesandro Volta into the conversation (whose experiments into muscle contraction in response to electric currents led to the invention of the battery – see picture courtesy of Wikipedia above).

Semmens’ short, latinate lines are then expanded to a paragraph by Witte, who spins them into a speaker’s reminiscences. “An Experiment in Galvanism” could be a disaster itself (lightning strike?), a religious experience, sex…all of which becomes, in Semmens’ response, Likestarlings’ first sestina, if I’m not mistaken, and a brilliant one. It is a form appropriate to the overlaying of repeated elements, which are now video games, muscle memory and the still-present natural disasters. The poem draws together virtual realities, learnt behaviours and violence.

Witte’s response mirrors Semmens’ poem in its stanzas, but discards the repeated words. And again, the poem turns to the personal, to memory, but in a way which seems to me uncannily consonant with the impulse of Semmens’ poem. It is wonderful when poets seem to have got under each other’s skin – each seeing into what the other is doing and extending it, making it their own.

Current events appear to seep into Semmens’ final poem, which ends in just as unsettled a place as Witte started them off. But this is somewhere neither poet could have got to without the other. These lines, from “The age of insecurity”, might apply just as well to the process by which poems are transformed in the back and forth, too:

blurring the continuities
we take one element for another,
water for breathing, plutonium for fire,
catastrophism as a way of life

Following on from Caleb’s last blog post, I’m inclined to agree that ‘impulse’ and ‘theme’ or concerns are probably more profound ways to root out poetic kinship than measures of formality or how ‘experimental’ someone appears.

It does seem that recently there has been a great deal of discussion regarding poetic schools, locales, groupings and styles though – and the obvious distinctions, value-judgements and schisms that such taxonomization entails. Not to make light of the intentions behind (sometimes crucial, sometimes pointless) conceptual ordering of poetry. As Caleb says, we need to have critical apparatus to grasp what’s going on of course, but the lasting quality of various items can be a much trickier thing. Vitriolic denouncements and supercilious dismissals of other styles or approaches seem like a waste of energy. In light of this, what sort of debates are actually progressive and useful – in the broadest sense? On what sort of debates ought we to be spending our limited energies?

At the same time, contemporary poetry is broader and more diffuse than ever. Perhaps it is an anxiety over this breadth that leads to such impassioned attack and defense positioning. It sometimes feels as if Poiesis is conceived as some great mother ship, with opposing factions grappling over its controls.

Hierarchization of living literature is a tricky and uncomfortable thing, and can be very divisive. So many decisions are instinctive – this is art after all. Within the poetic ecosystem, there ought to be space for many variants, adaptations, specializations. Naturally there will be experimentation because experimentation is both inevitable and essential in an ever-changing world. I’m wary of pushing the ecological analogy too far though – some things that are certainly wondrous and beautiful fail to survive.

Here at Likestarlings, we believe that good, urgent, vital writing can happen within many categories, can look and sound radically different, and can be apparently ’simple’ or ‘difficult’ on first examination. This might sound idealistic, or even naïve, but we reckon it’s as perfectly possible to have an eclectic taste in poetry as it is in music, films or condiments. And we think many people share this view. This isn’t to say that poets don’t have ancestry and heritage both selected and ineluctable, but new unities can be found regardless or in light of these things. We continue to be excited by poetry coming from and heading in many different directions, at many different heights and velocities. Fundamental to the Likestarlings project is getting these differences to talk to each other, and make something new out of that meeting.

Over the coming months, watch this fluxious space as we pair poets from across divides, physical and conceptual, real or imagined, and see what happens as they converse in their chosen medium.

A while ago an American poet told me that, as far as he could see, Britain had never had an avant-garde. I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether this might be a reasonable thing to say or not, but it did get me thinking about how we categorize poetry now.

Firstly, I wondered why we’d divide up poetry at all. I suppose the most obvious reason is that it tells a reader what assumptions they should bring to a poem – their reading kit. It must help readers choose what to read in the first place. If we can place poems in certain traditions, it might allow us to make connections which help explain how they have come about and which other writers and ideas they are talking to. Lastly, like political parties – or the idea of them – categories might allow us to have meaningful debates without having to reiterate our premises and beliefs all the time.

Since vers libre appeared there has been a seemingly straightforward way to divide all poetry up: metred and unmetred (assuming that as the least controversial definition of never-quite-totally-free verse). This, though, is a rather limited binary, since it only describes one aspect of the verse (even if we include other formal properties in the metred category). And description always seems to slip into evaluation. For many on one side, metred means conservative; for many on the other, free verse means unthoughtful, too easy even. Poets seem consciously or unconsciously to be aligning themselves with others when they write with or without certain structuring devices – but this seems often not the best indicator of the most important things about a poem or poet.

Recently I’ve come across a couple of lineage poems – one by WS Merwin (in The River Sound) listing poets that have meant a lot to him who have died in his lifetime, the other by Seamus Heaney (in Landing Light). Both place the poet in relation to a range of poets across the formal divide. This literary kinship, as a friend put it, seems to be the way many poets think about what they are doing. They think of themselves as participating in a conversation or shared endeavour with others from theirs and other ages. The exact nature of what is kindred here only comes through from triangulation between writers, and probably never very easy to pin down. But it is often, I sense, more to do with the impulse rather than the line breaks.

Another large basis for categorisation I can see is theme. As someone – I forget who, if I ever knew – said: ‘a poem is about something as a cat is about a house’. They’re usually shifty and diffuse, not expository. Having said that, with the necessary caveats we can, I think, usefully say certain poems and poets have similar concerns. This gets mixed in with characterization by certain common gestures and movements: the anecdote-leading-into-statement poem, the chain-of-linked-images poem, the free-association poem, the updating-mythical-figure poem. (These off the top of my head; I wonder if you recognise them as types – and what others you might add?)

Finally, there are the categories which usually only come retrospectively, although occasionally they are defined by practitioners in manifestoes (often more hopefully than accurately). These are the schools. I wonder which, if any, of these, are still alive. I’ve heard several poets suggest that in both the US and US, there is no solid and coherent enough living tradition in poetry for an avant-garde to define itself in opposition or at a tangent to.

Can we talk about a Cambridge school; martianists; post-postmodernists; new-new formalists; an avant-garde; others? Would we want to?

I’m very much in agreement with your last week’s post. I guess when writing I just hope that someone will read it – but who that person is I don’t really know. Of course you want there to be some form of engagement, otherwise it’s elliptical or solipsistic. So I always have an ‘audience’ in mind, but, as I say, their faces are obscure – as in a dream! Perhaps these ideas become clearer over time (or if people are actually reading your work!) Perhaps other people have a much clearer idea… and without needing a specific social cause/ coterie or such. What about you? It strikes me that poetry concerned with ecology ought to be trying to speak to everyone, somehow, anyway.

I suppose one of the problems with audience is that with most poetry which can broadly, vexedly, be termed ‘experimental’ or ‘progressive’ or something it seems likely that the audience is going to be almost solely other poets. This issue was dealt with rather grimly on the Poetry Foundation recently. Mind you, elsewhere they provide more detail about who is in fact reading the stuff, in America at least.

Basically I concur that you just can’t worry too much about it, but should try to keep some awareness. And absolutely to write with ‘the widest possible empathy’, as you say, is surely a noble aim, and the best thing we can do. And to write as clearly as possible, using just the right words to further one’s ends i.e. taking risks where you have to, and not hedging. All this sounds very obvious and Coleridge, but it’s never that simple.

In the quest of better elucidation and in order to swing things back more to our original discussion on ecopoetics I turned to something which had heartened me before: the final chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, entitled ‘What are poets for?’ He characterizes poets as sort of earth-links who can speak from/through/within the earth, at their best when not describing, not giving narratives, but ’saying’ the things that are – rather like the Sami tradition of Yoiking. He also offers us a way out of didacticism (as discussed before): ‘…Ecopoetics should begin not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics must first concern itself with consciousness.’

The argument is complex but the poet is seen as ‘the guardian, the treasurer, the primary maker of language’. The role is crucial, and the societal space is both necessary and allotted; poets are ‘imagination-workers’. This is a big job, and its takes me back to what I said in the first instalment of this conversation that it will a ‘failure of the imagination’ that scuppers us as much as anything.

But in the course of all this it’s occurred to me again that the vast majority of poets are naturally and unavoidably amateurs – in the etymological sense, and in the sense of being non-professional. This puts us in a very privileged position: we can say anything. But with that realisation comes huge responsibility of course.

Ah yes, a good question, who are we trying to provoke?

Can we answer, simply, that poetry is talking to anyone who’ll listen? Of course, there will always be layers of understanding. Poetry has a long tradition and knowing something of it will likely deepen a reader’s engagement. There may be allusions; poems might be having conversations that many, even avid, readers will miss. But we have to imagine, when we write, even with a certain didacticism, that we are writing for people, all of them; why not. This is not to indulge a delusion that everyone is reading poetry; we’re often reminded that they’re not. When we advocate poetry because we think it’s a good and noble thing, we should know who is coming into contact with it, and what their experience is like, but we shouldn’t obsess over it. If we write out of a depression over who is reading, what good does that do us? We have to write with the widest possible empathy, don’t we? And all writing which truly reaches for something is a provocation: to see more clearly, to understand in a different way, to feel…I realise that, once again, I am writing as if to rectify assertions you have not, in fact, made. I’m interested in how poets think of their ‘audience’. Do you have a definite sense of people in mind when you write?

The new conversation we’re really pleased to welcome to the site, between Brandon Krieg & T Zachary Cotler, is germane with reference to such questions. The first two poems are, I think, powerful, finely-made pieces which embrace complexity without obfuscation. They reach across time to first causes with seriousness and delight. Any poem which rhymes ‘Derrida’ and ‘esoterica’ is going to take some reading; but it is inclusive in the broader sense of letting as much life as possible into its scope.

I’ll leave it to them to continue with that investigation. And to you to make some more sense of all of this, as ever.

CK