poetry politics and another cup of tea, editor?

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I’ve just been accused of liking everything. Me! (Mom, stop it.) Who thought that would ever happen. And by someone who should know better.

Well, one does try to be nice. You never know when you’re going to slag off someone’s book and then run into them in a dark alleyway behind the Poetry Society, or they’re going to buy you a drink, full of bonhomie, in some pub full of pseudo-friendly rival poets and the next thing you know you’re on a train halfway to Dusseldorf, wearing someone else’s clothes.

It is a problem, this compulsion to be nice. Every time I say anything that isn’t nice – publicly, I mean, not just to friends, God no – my friends know only too well what kind of stuff I’m liable to come out with, God help them – however deeply I feel or think or believe it, the anxiety is terrible, sometimes I can’t even sleep. I worry about meeting the person somewhere and just having no excuse. What if you liked them? A perfectly nice person, say, with a tin ear. It’s not his fault he can’t hear the way his lines sound. A charming fellow, but trivial. And all the sweeter for it, if you suspend your disbelief – like that sweet young woman over there, she’s like a sugar cube. And those four or five poets, who are they, they all seem the same… Nothing to tell their work apart, or them. How can a person be so dull. And all your enemies are friends with your friends, anyway, and you’d never sit at tea with someone and slag off their friend – and if you do it in print you as good as just have. Haven’t you? Like the guy who publishes “versions” of other living writers’ poems, depriving those poets of access to English “translations” of their work or the royalties thereof… (but then what if you were friends with the versioned poet? What if he was better than the English one? What if he was rubbish?)

Uh oh. Thin ice. See? All the characters above are invented. Fun as it might be to have a blog dissecting the pretensions, etc, it would have to be a blog a clef, and I would be its notorious, feared author, a figure of universal loathing and suspicion. I’d have no friends, I’d be lonely and miserable, and the whole thing would be a failure. My poetry would become merely dark, no longer “darkly hilarious” (still much better than “hilariously dark,” I say), and I would myself descend into the pit of tedium. They’d find me drunk in the seedier pubs of Stoke Newington, reciting Gottfried Benn and holding tendentious monologues about the poets I’d once known: “No, no, she really thought she was something, I knew her, yes, knew her well, call that a rhyme? Ridiculous, no eye for an image at all, shoddy metaphors, self-indulgent, schoolgirl stuff, you should have seen her, let me tell you… And that hat!”

No, no. We don’t do this. Even sticking to the work itself I find it hard to dislike something publicly. The one negative review I had to write, I do stand by it but it cased weeks of anxiety. Sweating, losing sleep anxiety. The editor came back with 19 queries on it: “This is a strong thing to say; you will need to back it up better.” That kind of thing. I thought, oh no! I am the Hard Hand of Hackney. The Stiff Strap of Stoke Newington. A Bad Person. I addressed the 19 queries. The editor wrote back, saying, “thanks, well done. I think you’ve been fair.” I think I was so relieved I fell asleep. (A month later I ran into a friend, i.e., a friend, who had just reviewed the same book elsewhere and really loved it. Loved it.)

No, Baroque Mansions must aim to be a haven of peace, happiness, excitement and enthusiasms, not a stern chamber where all the not-good-enough will be called to their account. Unless they get seriously above themselves, of course, in which case we will get out our opera glasses and have a laugh! But we’ll leave the little guys, and those who know not what they do, alone… and as for that book about Keats, by that utterly charming Stanley Plumly, well. With all his hair, like theatre curtains going up? A work of love and devotion, both the hair and the book, and I for one will say nothing against it. Wait for my review, wherever it may appear.

About critics and literary reputation, here is what Gottfried Benn has to say, in one stanza of his poem 1886, translated by Tony Williams:

The newspapers criticise the execution
of Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness;
in contrast Blumenthal’s A Drop of Venom
is certain to receive the praise of posterity;
‘Over the head of Count Albert Vahlberg,
who holds an esteemed position in the best
metropolitan society,
a dark cloud floats’,
Zola, Ibsen, Hauptmann are dreadful,
Salambo a failure,
Liszt a ‘cosmopolitan’,
and here comes the slogan:
‘The reader is always right’,
he wants to know something about
leg-cramps
and out-of-body experiences.

****

(Sorry Mom)

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