Dear Walrus

"Maybe this is what is being constructed: a kind of ‘out building’. Not part of the main house but attached in some ways. It has windows through which the passerby can peer. Something’s going on in there but no one is quite sure what."

(Belgianwaffle, 19 May 2006)

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So, I am the Carpenter? Then 'you' - Youpi - must be the Walrus.

OK. I’m happy to enter the looking glass or play in a hall of mirrors. The idea of the Blog from the outset was to set off some kind of correspondence – and a Walrus is as good a correspondent as anyone else. So let’s go …

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Dear Walrus

Today, Tuesday 11th March 2008, I’m prepared to go on record as saying I think a major contributing factor to the US/UK poetry ‘split’ is down to teaching (good, poor, outstanding, misguided), full stop.

My own experiences of being taught poetry (by fabulous English teachers, don’t get me wrong) was largely under the shadow of I.A. Richards and the legendary ‘Practical Criticism’ paper. A poem became an exercise in mental agility. You had an hour in which to ‘process’ the poem through a series of machines – alliteration, metaphor, etc. Success reflected the extent to which the poem had been reduced to certain predictable features. The poem became a vehicle for cleverness. Crack it, solve it, explain it away. Next?

I think many English teachers are afraid of poetry (not just their students). I have had some colleagues who don't read it, prefer not to teach it, and others who believe it cannot be taught. If they do teach poetry, the poem tends to be diluted into prose (paraphrasable meaning, rhyme and rhythm as obligatory – but annoying – aspects to be discussed). Novels and plays are much more available to the kinds of analysis – and thus assignments – upon which 'good' teachers rely.

In a broader context – and moving to university level – poetry comes under the sway of the Academy. The teacher-professor is the Authority, thinks of his/her career trajectory, valuing letters after the name more than, perhaps, in the text. Professor X becomes the ‘authority’ on Blake, on Wordsworth, on Yeats. This, translated, can often mean they have staked their career (plus mortgage, plus kids’ school fees, plus down payment on the holiday villa) on this corner – and will defend it with their teeth. Papers are issued as much in the spirit of ‘disinterested’ research as as assertion of intellectual property rights. “Hands off – he’s mine!” Henry James anticipated this in several of his short stories.

I think I'm right in saying that Robert Duncan never got a degree. That Berrigan asserted that he was the "master of no art". And I remember an e-mail by Peter Riley ridiculing poetry competitions and their judges - who has the audacity to sit in judgment?

Lisa Jarnot describes classes with Robert Creeley: apparently he'd come in and read a poem and then pause and say something like "that was great wasn't it" and left it at that. (Obviously that relies on a pretty conducive atmosphere!).

Getting back to typical UK school teaching of poetry, there tends to be a very reduced sense of what poetry is. Ideally, for class purposes, it has to be of around twenty lines, possess a clearly separable 'argument' or narrative, some distinctive features and avoid any unpalatable language or issues. The sort of poem produced by - say - Duncan or Jack Spicer (the poem in series) is necessarily 'off limits'. Students form their taste based upon discrete poetic entities, usually 'well-crafted' (an unexamined concept), and displaying over-rich sounds (onomatopoeia being a favourite). Imagine a wine expert drinking nothing but thimbles of sweet port. O, for a draught of Chablis!

I'm more and more of the opinion that poetry makes you vulnerable. Not in the sentimental sense of liable to burst into tears. Rather, that you are confronted by something that challenges your assumptions, values, prejudices and habits of thoughts to the core. Start to talk about it (let alone write it) and yawning spaces open up. Each word is a chasm, the (w)hole you fall into. For me, Blanchot is absolutely right - the encounter with language enacts some fundamental encounter with the Other. (And why, in a sense, writing 'out' to an undisclosed walrus is perfectly apt). Certainly such un-certainty runs counter to what academia depends upon. How could one justify a Chair of Unknowing, a Faculty of the Dispossessed?

We're back to that great venomous phrase of Spicer's: the English Department of the Soul.

More and more I see parallels between the Church's suspicion and suppression of Gnosticism and Academia's relationship with Poetry. To simplify: the direct experience of the knowable-unknowable. Therefore, I think it runs deeper than simply a transatlantic poetic divide. Why, for instance, did Iain Sinclair, Lee Harwood, John James, Bill Griffiths, Tom Raworth not appear on any syllabus - or the shelves of Blackwells (at least as far as I can recall)? Yes, the mysterious J.H. Prynne was muttered about but then who had a copy?

That's enough hammering for today.

Yours faithfully,

The Carpenter