That’s very much what I meant, yes. It is difficult this thing of being overtly ‘direct’ in poetry. It so often blurs into a seeming or definite didacticism. And it explains why so much of what we find is oblique or incomprehensible. Adding a layer of artifice (and this is not to denigrate the intention) allows the writer to step back into the joy of poiesis, a joy (not the same as happiness) that having a surefire agenda displaces very easily. Any lyric impulse is innately troubled by the need to take make an ideology or value-system so explicit and naked as this.

Troubled, I would say, whether we realise it or not. And it’s out of this tension – the tension between the undeniable poetic instinct and a sense of that instinct being hijacked by something ineluctable like an emergency (in this case the ecological ‘crisis’) – that some of the best work seems to emerge. It appears throughout Peter Reading’s work, for example, but particularly in Faunal (2002). Although the lyric desire there to celebrate the natural world is ironized and sophisticated a step further by a dry, semi-scientific tone and the juxtapositions in the text. Perhaps because he recognises this tension more acutely than most. As in ‘Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas’ where the narrator describes ‘Mexican Free-tailed Bats,/ Tadaria brasiliensis (mexicana)‘ emerging from a roost as ‘One of the most spectacular/ phenomena I have ever been privileged to witness.’ But goes on to explain how he got banged up for ‘Public Intoxication’ after throwing his binoculars into a river.

But while the tension is there, Reading is so clearly didactic that it almost blasts through the issue altogether. You’re probably right, in that we should worry less about whether or not someone is being didactic per se but rather about what they’re saying and how well they’re saying it. But the unsettling thing in didacticism is the idea of certainty it relays/attempts to relay. As you say, it feels ‘predetermined and boring’. Poetry, I always thought, was supposed to inhabit that doubtful stretch, where slippage happens, to walk into the fog without a map and come back some funny mineral off the mountainside or something. Not dictate terms. I need to consider your closing questions for longer. However, I agree that some sort of provocation is vital – because that moves us forward, whereas the timelessly poetic objective of evocation might just have us looking back or standing still. The elegiac mode will come through whatever, but doesn’t serve our purpose now. Inherent in all this ‘-vocation’ there seems to be a target, an audience; but who, exactly, are we trying to provoke?

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…

With three conversations in progess and more coming online in the next few weeks, it’s been a good yuletide for Likestarlings. Thanks to these poets still at work, and all who slung back and forth with one another in plain view of the e-public last year.

In 2010, we are not planning on any radical (or, indeed, any) changes to the formula. But there are things from 2009 I’d love to see more of…

More transformations

My favourite so far is an exquisite flip along a homonym axis by Jeremey Over, who took Tim Atkins’ Italian father of the sonnet, ‘Petrarch #5’, and made him ‘Petroc Trelawny’, the presenter of the proms on Radio 3 and BBC4. Their conversation continues to probe the Romantic inheritance, parenthood and bees.

More investigation of the anthropocene

The conversation between Jared Stanley & Siddhartha Bose is exciting not only for its use of prose poems, rare on the site, but also the explicit, but by no means straightforward concern with anthropogenic climate change. Bose has taken Stanley’s compelling post-pastoral landscape firmly into an urban context and I’m looking forward to seeing how he responds. In their elegant but turbulent back and forth, Fergus Allen & Stephanie Bolster also worked with a palette of ‘creatures/Eternally eating and being eaten’ (Allen). Bolster’s poems, I think, have a wonderful sound play: ‘A cricket does what crickets do and the air quickens’.

Which reminds me: More transatlantic (and other more distant) connections

Because interesting things seem to happen when languages meet.

More explorations across the screen

Simon Smith & Ryan Murphy are involved in a conversation which breathes in and out with each poem, Smith exploding into clouds, and Murphy contracting. There is a very careful attention to formal echoes between these two, where ‘i/Phone’ becomes ‘i-/Solation’. Still going, it feels like this has the energy to run and run: as Smith’s poem has it, ‘And it doesn’t stop.    None of it/stops, ever’.

More pictures

Because so far we’ve had only a tantalizing glimpse of what’s possible.

More contact

We love to hear from people who are visiting the site, as well as our poets. Do let us know what you’re up to. On that note, congratulations to George Ttooulli, whose collection ‘Static Exile’ came out late last year and is a treat.