Poetry and the Flow Rate of Meaning
If there's one thing better than feeling superior to instapoets it's feeling superior to people that feel superior to instapoets. I'm not really a fan of instapoetry but I often find myself defending it because I find myself more irked by the gatekeeper tendencies of mainstream poets that get annoyed by their success. Their arguments tend to resemble a kind of Gordian knot made from the mutually negating arguments, "This stuff doesn't deserve to be popular" and "this is popular because most people are stupid".
I've always felt that one way to appraise a work of literature or orature is to look at the medium that it's been presented in. A poem that is printed in a slim volume might encourage the reader to read it slowly because if they read the poems at the same speed as they might read a news article they’ll end up finishing the book in half an hour and miss out on all the subtleties.
By contrast, if the poem is published on an instagram feed then it might not be trying to slow you down, it might instead be trying to impart some kind of meaning that strikes a contrast to the feed’s thirst traps and plate pics but does so in a way that is similar in its velocity.
This in turn made me think that one interesting contrast between varying schools of poets is in how their audiences expect meaning to arrive. Instapoets thrive in an environment where a feed is throwing up images, videos and sounds that demand an immediate emotional response. If you're going to make that same audience engage with a piece of text, the scroller needs to be able to read the whole thing and get a sense of its meaning in an instant.
As much as we portray instapoets as one homogenous mass stylistically, I think there are some notable differences between the abstract, vague platitudes of Atticus; the text/image interplay of Rupi Kaur and the stark, visceral poems of Warsan Shire. Shire is an interesting example as her work intersects with two groups other groups: Spoken Word poets and the academic mainstream.
If we continue this idea of a flow rate of meaning, we arrive at two groups of poets, the Spoken Word/Performance poets and the Popular Poets. There’s lots of crossover between these two groups. Perhaps the most familiar examples of the Popular Poets are the Liverpool Poets – Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Their poems are funny, entertaining and crafted with an obvious flair for many traditional poetical qualities such as metre, rhyme and metaphor. They succeed because the reader doesn't have to spend too much time teasing the meaning from their work.
Conversely, the poems can still be pored over and re-read in book form. There is no pressure for them to stand out within a torrent of content. So while an immediate discernment of meaning might be expected from their readership, they can do so at their leisure. The poems ask the reader to make a little time for them, rather than seeking them out in the very depths of their frenzied doomscrolling.
Performance Poetry and Spoken Word operate on a similar principle, the poem being performed is intended to be understood immediately. For instance, a poem performed at a Slam needs to make an immediate impression on its audience or its not going to score well. This is not to say that all live poetry should be immediately accessible. If live art forms such as theatre and music can be challenging and difficult for audiences, then live poetry can also follow these dynamics. This is why I reference Spoken Word and Performance Poetry as specific genres rather than as a signifier for all live poetry.
The aforementioned Liverpool Poets serve as good examples of Popular and Performance Poetry by this measure, as do John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Being immediately accessible doesn't necessarily equate to being dumbed down or anti-intellectual – ideas that are immediately apparent can still be provocative and challenging. The means in which the ideas are communicated can also involve a great deal of skill and thoughtfulness.
When we slow down the flow rate of meaning a little more, we arrive at the academic mainstream. These tend to be the poets that we see nominated for prizes and published by the mainstream poetry publishers such as Faber, Picador, Cape and Carcanet. While these publishers have also published Performance Poetry and Spoken Words as well as Avant Garde and Language Poets (who you've probably already guessed are a later destination in this essay). Some of the academic mainstream poets are more accessible than others, at one end of scale we might find the usually accessible work of Hugo Williams, Wendy Cope and Don Paterson, while the more experimental end might feature the works of Anne Carson, C.D. Wright, Alice Oswald and Roy Fisher. But however challenging these poets might be for the casual reader (ie. the reader that might seek to read a poem in the same way that they might read a standard paragraph of prose), they all write poetry that is intended for the act of close reading. In turn, this close reading is partaken with the aim of uncovering more meaning within the poem. Close reading doesn't just require the reader to make time to spend with the text, it also requires the reader to pay close attention to it. While there might (or might not) be a degree of meaning weaned from a first read through, further examination of the poem’s imagery, line breaks, rhythms and register might provide further details to be considered – some of which may enhance or contradict the initial sense of meaning. Many of these poems are valued because they might provide a multiplicity of meanings rather than one definite sense of purpose.
Finally, we get to the post-modernists. These might be American poets from the Language movement such as Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman or British poets such as JH Prynne and Tom Raworth. The Postmodernists tend to be as much of a reaction against neo-formalists such as Larkin and Auden as they are about continuing the modernist, pentameter-breaking visions of Eliot and Pound. As far as meaning is concerned, there is none. Or, to put it more succinctly, the meaning of the poem is left entirely to the reader. The job of the poet in this context is to veer into the instincts that the academic mainstream poets entertain when they use line breaks and other technical elements to bring more nuance, ambiguity and multiplicity into their poems. The difference is that there is no original impetus of meaning that governs the postmodernist poem, the poem is an elaborate construction for the reader to engage with in whichever way they wish.
Here’s a little example from J.H Prynne:
The broken dangerous cup
is not mended.
The point of sky has
all that in sight but
optics apart. Parsecs
fiddle the onion,
don't you know?
This poem is an excerpt from a sequence (Fire Lizard, 1970) and so you are already missing out on the context. However, this little excerpt can't help but trigger the reader's urge to find meaning within it with its precise images (broken dangerous cup) and conversational turns of phrase (don't you know?). The poem is assembled as a kind of fidget toy for a human imagination that is always grasping for meaning.
So far, I've probably not told you anything that you didn't already know. My initial intention was to provide an image that helps people to understand the aims and intentions of different genres and schools of poetry in a way that doesn't posit one a superior to another. This schema divides these genres by merit of how available and accessible meaning is within their work and theorises why different poets require more or less from the reader in its dissemination. This schema, in my initial scheme, runs from the Instapoets (meaning is divulged quickly) to the Postmodernists (there is no inherent meaning independent of the reader's labour in reading the poem).
The Flow-rate Theory Morphs into a Horseshoe Theory…
However, something struck me while I was halfway through writing this: many Instapoets also rely on the reader to provide their own meaning. Specifically, poets such as Atticus write such vague and abstract phrases that they don't even qualify as platitudes. The poems gain their power from the intense identification of their readers with their own emotional lives. There isn't much available detail in a poem such as this one by Atticus:
You deserve
to be the
person you
were meant
to be
The poem is available as a print that can be bought from Atticus's website for £32. I personally find Atticus a lot harder to defend than Rupi Kaur, who I think has an excellent understanding of her medium and the interplay of image and text within digital media. But this Atticus poem feels utterly indefensible. And yet ...
I think of the above poem as a limited print and realise that in some ways it's not just a poem, it's a mirror. It is a surface which is designed for the reader to see a reflection of themselves. Not in a way in which they stand in front of it for long stretches of contemplation, but as something to be glimpsed in little snatches of attention here and there. This differs from the Postmodernists in the sense that I don't think Atticus is intending someone to spend a great deal of time extracting meaning through different readings of his meaningless assemblage. There is still a germ of meaning but the growth of that germ depends entirely on the labour of the reader.
The point of this essay is not to hit the reader with a brand new horseshoe theory that seeks to join the postmodernists with the instapoets but rather to emphasise that in order to understand a poem we need to understand the way that each genre of poetry functions in relation to its preferred medium and its audience. When we hear a damning take down of one particular genre or school of poetry, it is often from the vantage point of a standard that the genre never wished to appeal to or be judged by.
Thanks for reading this
Summer has finally arrived in the UK and brought flying ants and IT failure in its wake. These aren't the ideal conditions for getting stuff done but I really wanted to get this out today. I've changed up my writing setup recently. I bash out my drafts in plain text documents and work on them a number of devices while accessing those .txt files in the cloud.
Therefore I am feeling a little after the weekend crash because the cloud based solution wasn't one that was run by Microsoft. That said, I can't help but wonder if the other cloud services I use are just as prone to a similar kind of mishap.
I suppose we could all make like George RR Martin and and keep it real with some MS DOS, green screen monitor and floppy disk drive. I don't know if Hugo Williams still does it, but when he was poetry editor at the Spectator he used to type up his copy on a typewriter and send it to the main office by motorcycle courier. This all makes me think about how the tools we use to write with are both ways of sharing as they are ways of writing and how there might have been an advantage to maintaining a bit more space between these two processes.
Anyway, that's something that I might develop in a future post. The next one is tentatively based on the loneliness of the act of writing and how we hope for our words to go out into the world and make friends so we don't have to. If that sounds appealing then you can always hit subscribe so it can drop into your inbox the moment it's ready.
Cheers
Niall