Poetry on the page sets out to do something different, something that can be revisited, and to say that it is elitist is to miss the point comprehensively and to trivialise the whole idea of response to poetry. So that an appreciation of, say, performance poetry does not have to be weaponised to make facile criticisms of what may be more “difficult” or have less instant impact. ![]() Burnside sensibly insists that excellence belongs to the mode and idiom you’re trying to succeed in and that therefore we should be free to applaud where we see quality, but slow to think that one kind of quality has to prevail. He is salutary on the sterile debates over “high art” and “popular art”, performance art and poetry on the page (Is Bob Dylan a better poet than Tennyson? Is Kate Tempest a better poet than Ruth Padel?). The real enemies are poetry that has been instrumentalised in one way or another, subordinated to a cause, and poetry that is manifestly made not born – self-consciously foregrounding its own inventiveness rather than taking us into a place where something new is pushing through. Throughout the book, Burnside determinedly defends poetry that may not be clearly of the first rank but does its job of liberating us to stand aside from control and purpose. Verbose, self-indulgent poetry, drawing attention to its own ingenuity, labours for surface effect rather than transparency to what the poem directs us to – which is not themes or ideas but the “music” of the givenness of a moment, or a juxtaposition of words, or a collision of sensations. Yet he also has astringent things to say about “lazy” difficulty. ![]() Pushing students into prematurely writing their own poems on the subject further shrinks the challenge of staying with the difficulty and valuing it in its own terms. Pupils, he says, are likely to go away thinking more about this subject matter than about what has been happening in the words they hear or read. On this basis he has some pretty sharp things to say about how poetry is often taught in schools – as illustrative of subject matter rather than as something that has to be wrestled with first and foremost as speech.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |