In the expansive and marvelous new conversation between Valerie Witte & Aidan Semmens (now complete), Witte’s first poem is funny 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

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?

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

I feel a bit dizzy trying to follow up on all of these well-spun threads, so will concentrate on your statement that ‘didacticism is nearly as worrying’ as documentation and see where I end up.

The other day I was discussing Jorie Graham’s Sea Change and someone said that they were put off by its didacticism. The judgement surprised me because, as a collection of poems handling climate change, I had thought of it as trying to keep open some space which is usually closed (on both sides of the ‘debate’), as conversation falls into well-dug furrows (denial/apocalypse). Another person had no trouble with the collection being didactic, but was offended, to the point of feeling unable to read it, despite being a big Graham fan, by the apparent arbitrariness of her line breaks (alternating very long/very short lines). I wondered whether the two things were connected. Is it a self-consciousness about entering into a contentious discourse which led Graham to impose such an obvious constraint on herself? Are the frankly obtuse – but regularly so – line bre-/-aks a protective mask when saying something, as a poet, somebody else might disagree with?

I wonder whether we (I’ll speak for the air) have got rather too worried about didacticism. Or, more precisely, that it is only lazy didacticism that is a problem. That is, if a poem is written as if it knows everything, it is likely to feel predetermined and boring. If a poem asserts the poet’s view as inherently better than everyone else’s it’s likely to be boring and troubling. But a being-didactic which assumes that any poem is in conversation with the world, which asks for a response, but which asserts a moral position which it is not afraid of being disagreed with over, that seems productive. Peter Reading, who you mention, tells his readers off in -273.15: they should have listened to him more carefully; Milton was certainly trying to instruct…

The possibility of disagreement asks for some other useful attributes too – someone must be able to be let into a poem to disagree with it (even if it’s difficult). This doesn’t mean that all poetry must be reducible to argument – yuk – but it does mean that we are in the business of communicating. Of taking seriously the collaborative part of ’reality, our great collaboration’, as you put it so well.

It may be that this is not at all what you meant by didacticism, so apologies if that’s so. What were you thinking?

Also – what part can provocation play in this collaboration? What does a risky poem look like now? What about a shocking poem? Perhaps this is to miss the point. I’m often shocked simply by a brilliant line-break, or a moment of glorious concision. Difficult to think, though, when I’ve been morally challenged by a poem recently…you?

CK

…between Robert Selby and Catherine Theis. See Robert’s first poem here.

This is another transatlantic pairing and we’re really pleased to welcome both poets to the site.

Poems will be added as they come…