Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

Peter Porter in his review for Poetry Review (issue 91-1) of O’Brien’s Downriver includes O’Brien with, among others,
Don Paterson, Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage as poets who ‘bring back intellectualism and populism to British
Poetry’. Porter sees these poets as ‘delivering us’ from ‘the hermetically sealed Old Experimenters in J. H. Prynne’s
Cambridge’. Of these “saviours” of British poetry, Porter says that they ‘cared enormously about versification’ and
that their material was ‘sharply observed’ and (echoes of the anecdotal?) ‘wittily presented’. Porter notes that
O’Brien ‘writes with the ease and assurance of a poet so at home with the real world’. This need/desire for realism is
further expressed in O’Brien’s entry under the academic staff biographies list of Sheffield Hallam University:
His poetry often combines demotic and more literary language and is strongly aware of its northern
location-a poem such as ‘Cousin Coat’ creates an angry presence of historical injustice, closed mines
and cenotaphs, by enhancing the rhythms and rhymes of ordinary speech. This means that when a
more extravagant word is used, it feels necessary.
Thus, we see realism (as geographical location and linguistic functionality) emphasised and esteemed. For Porter,
such realism is preferable to what he sees as O’Brien’s former less-functional language, which ‘sometimes tended to
be strangled Laocoon-wise by their ramifications, their lineation and syntax tangling like roots in a pot’.
David Wheatley, in his Guardian (October 5, 2002) review of the mainstream poet John Fuller’s Now and for a Time,
notes that O’Brien, in The Deregulated Muse, sees Fuller as a postmodernist poet. This is a designation, which, says
Wheatley, ‘must have left readers of Jeremy Prynne and the Conductors of Chaos poets scratching their heads in
disbelief’.
Given all this, I fail to understand why, in recent years, mainstream poets such as O’Brien have been willing to bite
the hand that feeds them. Could it be that they sense the Hand’s “imminent” demise, and are preparing for the time
when they will have to jump ship and adequately explain themselves to their new crew in terms of a redefinition of
their poetic lineage?
Something of this can be glimpsed with Seamus Heaney in his The Redress of Poetry where he appears to want his
cake and eat it. He says: ‘Poetry cannot afford to lose its […], joy in being a process of language as well as a
representation of things in the world’.
His empiricism is unavoidably evident in this statement. However his about-face on the nature of poetic language is
puzzling. Could this turnaround perhaps indicate that Heaney realises that his poetic modus operandi is beginning to
lose currency in the more progressive circles of academic poetic discourse, and that to fully safeguard his
posthumous poetic reputation he has to enable future critics of his work to capably defend his reputation against
charges that he is a merely descriptive poet?
Yet, his continual wariness of the linguistic and formal properties of a poem is still very much evident. This can be
seen in his cautious praise (also in The Redress of Poetry) of the descriptive poet Edward Thomas:
Thomas came through with a poem in a single, unfumbled movement, one with all the confidence of a
necessary thing, one in which again at last the fantasy and extravagance of the imagery and diction did
not dissipate themselves or his or his theme.
Here, Heaney can be seen elevating poetic content over poetic language. This would seem to bring in to question his
sincerity in saying that poetry cannot afford to lose its ‘joy in being a process of language’.
To Connote or Not to Connote
14 April 2007
It is not often that I’m quoted, so when I came across George Szirtes’ 2007 Stanza Lecture, and saw that he’d quoted
the following statement (which I’d made on an online poetry forum last year) I was quite flattered until I continued
reading, and saw his response to it. The quote from me is:
I don’t think there is such a thing as difficult poetry, only poetry that connotes or denotes. The former is
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