There is nothing more personal than poetry. It can go deeper than any love letter. It can be the most disciplined form of writing and the freest. For the past ten years, I have been poetry reader at the Observer. (I read and return–almost always–the unsolicited poems that come in). It is a strange thing to send poems to an editor you have never met. I know, because I have done it.
I know what it is like to fold up white A4 pages and entrust them, with hope, to their envelopes. And I know that they have a way of coming back like relentless homing pigeons. When a poem was accepted, it was the greatest joy imaginable; rejected poems were a disgrace. Virginia Woolf liked to have several pieces out to editors at once, to avoid the sense of consuming failure that rejection slips could bring. Good advice. Another solution is to stop writing altogether. I stopped writing poems when I started reading them (unpublished ones, that is). Reading poems in bulk is like being in a noisy room in which, as often as not, more than one person is crying. It is hard to hear your own voice beneath the sound of other people's. Reading poems made me too self-conscious about writing them. It gave me a dismal sense of just what it meant to do it badly.
I started as a poetry reader at Jonathan Cape, job-sitting for James Lasdun (then becoming known as a poet himself). I can still picture the narrow blue rejection slips and I remember the words, in Lasdun's angular hand, "probably certifiable" clipped to the top of somebody's complete poetic output. Now, after years of reading, I can confirm that the certifiable do write to me–if not from actual mental institutions, then from the private madhouses of their minds. But so do people of every sort: sane, eccentric, educated, uneducated, octagenarians, children. I am still amazed by the poetry mountain that comes my way. From hospitals, prisons, universities. From London and remote corners of Ireland. Poems from India on tissuey paper, poems from America, Africa, Israel. I have had poems faxed to me, poems delivered by hand and, I fear, soon, a queue of poems at my e-mail address. Once a poet even called to recite her work over the telephone (a poem in praise of Margaret Thatcher).
It is a peculiar exertion to read poems properly. They demand a different quality of attention from prose. The best poems require and reward re-reading. But it is easy to get poetic indigestion. Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate as I read. I start pondering the second-class stamps on the return-to-sender envelopes (discouraged? realistic? short of cash?) and the first class stamps (urgent? keen? about to be discouraged?). Thinking about stamps is just one sign that the poems are, as my grandmother used to say, NBG (no-bloody-good). It is so hard to write a BG poem. Most of the "poems" offered are not poems at all. A poem–by my definition–must do something that would not work as well in prose. This is not to say that the language itself need be rarefied. Many of the poems I am sent remind me of Eliza Doolittle: they put on a strained classy accent in the hope of impressing. I like poems which use language in a new way, but only when the poetic voice rings true. The best poems are like keepsakes, you want to hear them read aloud and to learn them by heart, so that they become portable and a part of your life.
Poems like this hardly ever turn up. But when they do it is like finding pearls in mud. It is especially satisfying when the poet is unknown. A poem in a newspaper can be the start of a career. The problem is that newspapers like their poems short, or not at all. Poems are always the first thing to be axed by editors because they are not tied to a deadline and are often used as space-fillers for otherwise inconvenient corners. I am always having to write to say that the poems I have been sent are too long to consider or that the poems I have accepted may not appear for 18 months. Newspapers measure poetry by the yard (or millimetre). And subbing poetry does not go down too well with poets... although I have seen it tried.
It is easy to return bad poetry. It is harder to know what to do with the overcrowded neighbourhood of the quite good. One line of encouragement and you may never be free from the attentions of the writer. Poets are thought to be thin-skinned. But some have the vulnerability of a rhinoceros. Their persistence is almost, but not quite, admirable. I can only guess at the vanity or stoicism they must possess to keep on filling my in-tray with nuisance mail. And yet there are also poets whom I am always glad to read but never quite persuaded to publish. One, in particular, writes about love in a way that makes me glad not to be her. She is lyrical, accomplished, but perhaps too wistful for her own good (her heart as faint as her typewriter ribbon). Her handwriting is a little shaky, too, as if the effort of writing is almost too much to bear. It is as if I had been reading an intense, slightly puzzling diary for nine years. I like to think that I am saving her for the sort of rainy day that would suit her.
Much poetry is written as therapy. I receive poems about the death of loved ones, about the end of romance, about suicidal thoughts. Sometimes, after a day of reading, I trudge home under an uncomfortable mantle of anonymous sorrow. I cheer myself up by thinking that some poems will have served a therapeutic purpose simply by being written. Indeed, poetry can be the greatest therapy there is. Andrew Marvell's "The Definition of Love," WH Auden's "The More Loving One", Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" could all serve as therapy for the heart-broken. But only great art can be a tonic in this way.
I get many poems about topical matters: wars, politicians, starving children, royalty. (I received surprisingly few about Diana). Topical poems are seldom any good. The poems seem hurried and opportunistic, as if their authors assume that newspapers only print poems which reflect the news. I like poetry powered by emotion. I like poetry to have form and I am not against rhyme when properly used. TS Eliot has a lot to answer for, however, when he said that poetry can communicate before it is fully understood. He should have added that obscurity for its own sake is not a virtue. I get far too many cryptic poems of which I can make neither head nor tail. I also know just how heavy "light" verse can be.
At the end of the millennium, poetry is flourishing: there is so much being written. But is any great poetry being written now? Is there anyone to rival, say, WH Auden or Robert Lowell? I don't think so. This is a defended age for poetry. Armadillo poets are out in force, protected by wit and intellect. The poets who are safest to admire–Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray–all have something in common. It is not merely that they are men. They are virile writers and the risks they take tend not to be emotional ones. Theirs is a poetry made of stone–not glass. I too admire them (Les Murray the most) but I have never been tempted to learn a single line from any of their poems by heart and I consider that a bad sign. Poetry has become too earthed for its own good. There are no "viewless wings" as the century closes. Of course there will never be another Emily Dickinson, or a Keats. But who will succeed them? More cerebral poems than emotional poems are being written now. Love poetry seems second-rate, tarnished by self-consciousness. It is perhaps particularly difficult to write an authentic love poem, precisely because literature is so full of great love poetry. But I think it is more than this. Our poetic age is, in comparison to the ages which preceded it, in flight from feeling. Much poetry of the moment is filled with incongruous circumstantial detail, like prose in hyperdrive. It is clever, modish, desiccated–and I would rather eat dry coconut than read it.
Women poets writing now are, almost by definition, minor. But I prefer Carol Ann Duffy to many of her male contemporaries. I enjoy reading Penelope Shuttle, Elizabeth Jennings, Alice Oswald and younger poets such as Sophie Hannah and Kate Clanchy. But it would be far-fetched to class any of them as great. Of course it is easier to look back than forwards, and greatness may be only seen in retrospect. It is not in evidence in my poetry pile. But I have found other things there, including the father of my three youngest children. One day I picked out a poem–a very good poem–about the end of a marriage. I couldn't have guessed that it would also mark the beginning of my new life.
New Rules for the New economy
Kevin Kelly
Fourth Estate 1998, £15
The poetry mountain
Poetry is flourishing, but how much of it is really good? Very little judging by my postbag as the Observer's poetry reader
November 20, 1999
