William Bibby

A reply from Rod Farley on August 28th 2009

Friday, 28 August 2009 at 11:17

I don't get you. Are you in favour of thinking the Un..., or not?
Cos I am.
I want poems to shock, not leave the silly bloody reader saying 'Oh, that's nice' in a whiny ever-so voice. Poems have got to be big. Bring back Ulysses - I mean Tennyson's, not the Irish madman's - & Dryden, Sassoon, Arnold, Byron, Graves. No more sissy stuff like Wordsworth & Laurie Lee, which is only fit for the loo.
Why are we agreeing about the toilet? Have you got a problem in that area?

Rod Farley





Thanks Rod (can I call you Rod?) Trying to make sense of something that is too difficult to articulate, or to make accessable something that is important but elludes descrip­tion, is what I mean by the 'unthinkable', not outrageous, highly contentious, controversial thoughts but rather those things which deny thought about them. For instance you can't really have meaningful thoughts about death, you can imagine death, and you can speculate on death but you can't describe death as it really is for the obvious reason that you haven't experienced it. You can't properly articulate your thoughts about falling in love, you can describe your feelings, you can create metaphors to attempt an explanation but you can't pin down 'love' to a series of concrete ideas like you can about, say, democracy.So in order to create (in this case) poetry about one of these subjects it seems to me that one has to master a form of 'atmosphere' which sometimes means that the poem (or the painting, or the music) doesn't appear to make much obvious sense but, if it works, will capture a feeling or form a novel idea for the reader. Sign posts. This is what I think contemporary poetry should do and at its best give a moment of deep reflection and surprising insight.Not, however, a new way of looking at broccoli as if it were an entirely mysterious and unexplored object, which is what much contemporary poetry is about.

In the next Blog I discuss one of these poems.....but I haven't finished it yet because the toilet's blocked.

18th. August a response from Mr. Rod Farley

Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 11:15

I admire WB for bearing his soul so fearlessly on his weblog, but stick to poems, William. Your prose is shit.

The degeneration of poetry into navel-gazing 'ball-lessness' is a result not, my friend, of the emergence of women poets, but the zeitgeist in general. No one dares generalise, be brave in thought or word, paint the picture large etc. etc. because we're all so fucking scared of being scrap-heaped as 'fascists', 'retards' or 'Olde Colonials'. So poets end up retrieving little bits of nostalgia, screwing up the phrases to sound mysterious, and ending with a 2-line, ever-so-clever conclusion/thought for the poor reader to take away to the loo.
Come back, Mr Larkin; teach 'em how to think the unthinkable.

Having got that off my chest, I have to say your poems are OK.



Many thanks MR. Farley...'think(ing) the unthinkable' and then manipulating the thought into shape and rendering it as poetry is exactly what I am arguing against, the crises of thinking the unthinkable must allow the poetry to escape these kind of doctrinaire rules. But I do agree about the toilet.

Something Radical This Way Must Come

Saturday, 15 August 2009 at 12:07

Since Christ (The Common Era, as we now call it) the writing of poetry has been dominated by men. From the Eclogues of Virgil to the publication of TS Elliot’s Waste Land I can only think of a handful of women poets of note (although there must have been more). Elinor Wylie, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anna Akhmatova, Eliza Cook, Marianne Moore (just squeezed in with a volume called ‘Poems’ which she didn’t know was being published) The Waste Land was published in 1922.

Women wrote, of that there are ample and brilliant examples, but they didn’t write poetry. Or if they did it was seldom published. Poetry, like much else, was a male domain.

But after the Great War things began happening first in the field of Chemistry and Physics were women’s names kept appearing as very significant (often dominant) contributors to the establishment of an answer to the question ‘why?’ Why the world was like it was? Why the world ordered itself in the way it did? Why matter assembled itself and why matter mattered? Lisa Meitner, Maria Goeppert and two chemists Marie Curie and Irene Joliot, amongst other Nobel Prize winners.
A poetry in its way of investigation but subsequently with very serious and hidden intentions that spread in to politics and Universal Suffrage and the beginnings of women’s claims for equality with men.

Then after the Second War the poets start rolling in, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and then everyone else in the last three decades of the century.

In the Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1958 edited by D.J Enright there are 58 poets…3 are women.
In The New Poetry edited by A. Alvarez published by Penguin in 1962
there are 26 male poets and Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton. (I suppose if you were only to have two women then these two, offering such solidarity as Sexton offered posthumously to Plath, would make sense
Women poets being published now far exceed men. The scores are like this:
Bloodaxe Books Poetry published in 2008 Women 21…men 7
Poetry Society New Poetry Collections 2008 Women 79…men 63 (and this includes all UK Published books of poetry except anthologies, out of print re-publications like Basil Bunting’s Brigg Flats, translations and tapes and cd’s)
Forward Prize anthology for winners in various categories in 2008
Best Single Poem Women 37…men 25.
Of the major prizes awarded in, shall we call it, the 2008 Poetry Prize Season Women 19…men 8

So it goes on, I don’t think any of the above has gone unnoticed and I could easily be accused of the obvious, yet I have to give this pre-amble because the tone of contemporary poetry has changed as a result; as you would expect.

The classic womanly insights that mostly elude men have a tone that is closer to the body than the abstract. They present themselves ‘now’. They have an army of northern wit, factory wit, fishwife wit, that finds itself continually embellished and woven into the fabric of poems that men find great difficulty in emulating.

Men’s contemporary poetry is sloshing about in a huge pond of self examination and the trivial or gigantic, depending on which you look at it, emasculation that is taking place. I am allowed an opinion, aren’t I?

The Forward Prize for best collection 2008 has 6 men and no women (unusual!) they blunder about, mostly biographical, desperate to make sense of their ballessness; one of them still at a creative writing course heading express-like toward an horizon that keeps receding, others trapped by foreboding (as well they might) and only one (we are allowed opinions aren’t we?) who’s brilliant and forensic discussion of Victorian drainage makes everything worthwhile. But a sewage system as a subject for a male poem is interesting, isn’t it?

The women appear in the next section in cocktail dresses dripping with ice. Men seem to have forgotten how to put on very classy dresses with a well placed broach of startling pearls and rubies. My overwhelming feeling is that they would like to but can’t find anything to fit. Then again perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps I’d like to wear Coco Chanel.

The other point, more seriously and more critically, is this: contemporary women poets in the UK have been very heavily influenced by comedy.

I mentioned ‘factory wit’ earlier because this was the turbo-driven source for the new women comediennes. Indeed to ram the point home there are comedy clubs in the UK called The Comedy Factory and the Gag Factory. I can’t think (yet again) of a contemporary poetess who has not used that endearing tonal lure in her poetry before delivering a devastating punch line. Jo Brand humour, Linda Smith, Dawn French, Victoria Wood and of course the poet comedienne Pam Ayres and hundreds more. All of them influential beyond their wildest dreams.

Carol Ann Duffy, our new PL, does it, alot. One example, because examples go on and on, is: ‘…history’s stinking breath in her face.’ proceeded by a comedy routine, the final line from a poem in The Feminine Gospels.

Kathleen Jamie: ‘I blame the pail/set under our blocked kitchen rhone…’ the first line of a poem about becoming pregnant. A joke about men that Jo Brand and Victoria Wood and many others made their names with, that leads again into something more profound.

The tonal lure goes something like this:
‘Ooooo you poor dear/you look worn to a thread/come to me and tell/what life’s like/for a mass murderer…’

It’s funny and new and coquettish but its wit comes at the expense of something.

We men have tried similar adventures. I remember being given a copywriting test at J. Walter Thompson in the late sixties that had the question ‘Describe to a Martian how to cook and butter toast’. I don’t want to be too uncomplicated about this but you can see where I’m going.

Craig Raine and the ‘Martians’ was the outcome of very fashionable and thrilling new ways to string words together born of the advertising industry.
The practioners seem to have faded away but they threw long shadows that still darken the backs of poetry books published today. The by-line is ubiquitous, ‘His/Her poetry makes the everyday seem extraordinary’ or variations on this.

The Martians still grope for comprehension of our ‘ordinary’ world packing it with explosive synaesthesias, surreal word twinning and dramatically disordered metaphors, but leave us ultimately stranded on another planet.

Collectively men and women poets need to return to the elusive atmosphere of poetics’ William Empson calls that thing that enables inarticulate transcendent insight, not merely profound and witty thought.