New Poetry Meets the General Reader

I was in the house of a friend’s parents recently and noticed, stuck to the fridge door, a poem clipped from a newspaper, among the sundry magnets and notices. Companion to book reviews, its subtleties had taken their fancy as being more than ephemera. Good, I thought, these are poetry readers – an engineer and an art teacher – who can confidently duck and weave among poems that come their way and say, yes, this one’s a pleasure. But do they buy and read collections of poetry? Well, they would more often if … I think there are a lot of ‘would if’ readers who might, nevertheless, purchase a volume after a poet has won a big award such as the Nobel Prize for Literature. But in many respects, any halcyon nexus that once existed, part real, part imaginary, between poetry and readers is by now famously tenuous. Put this down, way back, to the perceived obscurity of some strands of modernist verse, or the way changing social conditions have affected reading habits – whatever. Some secondary school English teachers are unwitting a betters of the situation, having been turned off when young by their teachers, and so on in a kind of fractally repeating way. But still there are poems that defy gravity at eye-height and grace fridge doors. Among the sunnier solutions I’ve come across to lure potential readers is to introduce a scheme that fosters the placing of a poetry anthology beside Gideon’s Bible in motels – an idea hatched in America. Well, okay. But in this country the poems would be damned by association. Then there are the various potentials of the internet. Meantime, performance poets continue to take an active approach, having eschewed poetic marinades in favour of rapid delivery and fast digestion. As the song says, it’s a wide open road. But I think of that poem on the fridge door – how satisfying the relationship between poetry, food, and drink! – and the so-called general reader. There, in a kitchen, a token of long-lasting verbal pleasure. It’s not often, though, in reviews of poetry, particularly those with the virtues of a postmodern bent which foreground technique, that the word ‘imagination’ gets much of a run, although its qualities lie at the heart, I think, of poetic pleasure and, indeed, generously human responses to the world. Technique – the great facilitator. So, as critical orthodoxies come and go, there will be varying emphases which in turn can give rise to fresh poetics. This is where things start to become tendentious. I sometimes wonder what the general reader – the engineer, the art teacher – can make of magazine reviews, critical jargon notwithstanding, that are a lightly disguised excuse for sniping among players in the field. The reception of poetry is all so personal here, a poet recently visiting this country stated to me. I blame general readers – paying insufficient attention, they’ve left it to the poets to have a free-for-all. Well, it’s a sporting country. Anyway, as it happens, a sought-after general reader has been identified because of a tell-tale poem stuck on a fridge door. Where does she go from here to find more broadly what’s on offer? A recent anthology is a good idea, though it will be prudent to flick through any introduction that outlines tribal machinations, often in a remarkably serious way; the reader however might wonder how in the circumstances the poems ever got written. This bit’s really for the poetry brokers. She’d be better off beelining to the heart of the book, for there are many fine poets in this country, acute observers, perceptual tightrope walkers, status quo breakers with a social conscience and, although their poems may have drifted to the margins of attention, this doesn’t mean they need to stay there. Here’s exploration, free of physical hazards. If poetry is to survive as a viable art form – its demise has been announced more often than the novel’s – it will be because it claims or reclaims the attention of non-specialist readers. Too often the language that surrounds its reception is perceived as being hermetic, partly because critics are, perhaps inevitably, poets themselves engaged in various forms of debate about the ‘poetry scene’, which by its nature tends to be inward-looking, autonomous, split off from a readership. It’s a dilemma. Other more popular genres of literature are likely to be discussed in a way that’s better attuned to non-specialist readers and without any loss of sophistication. As a lover of the form and typically choosy, I’m pleased when I see poetry shake off its stigma as the difficult relation in literature, cease to freeze with fear otherwise cheerful English teachers and arrest casual readers. As it happened, I was familiar with and liked the work of the poet whose poem was on the fridge door, and wrote down the names of her books and a publisher. And I was reminded of the time when I first rescued with scissors a poem from the pages of a newspaper. Tissuey airmail paper; adventurous poem. Sometime between then and now, I had casually switched from being a general reader to what, beside the fridge, defined me as a specialist: the ability to make a book list. Could I have been more helpful than this? Well, no. My friend’s parents had managed confidently – and unknowingly – to evade, sidestep, overlook all manner of critical gatekeepers (except the obscured newspaper editor) and found themselves individually at large within the borders of a poem that surprised and delighted them. I couldn’t help that.

Andrew Sant

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The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

‘Calm Voice’, a new poem by Anders Villani

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

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