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Why poetry is the hip new way to express yourself
June 1st, 2009
I luurve writing poetry,” drawls Jerry Hall lusciously. “It just comes to me and I write it down.” Hall, who composes heartfelt ditties on relationships, is just one high-profile example of a mass rush to express ourselves in verse. Michelle Obama hosted a poetry jam at the White House earlier this month, Kate Nash is a fan, and all over the country poetry slams — where street poets rap out their musings — have become the hot ticket. We even have an exciting new female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Poetry, it seems, has been knocked off its elevated literary perch and become yet another new rock’n’roll.
So what has unlocked our inner muse, and why are women in particular getting so turned on by the power of verse? Well, first, those accessible, conversational songs of Lily Allen, the Streets’ Mike Skinner and Kate Nash got us thinking — to the tune of “doesn’t sound so hard ...” They, in turn, enabled the breakthrough of a new generation of role models — who took poetry off the page and into live poetry slams and jams.
Brigitte Aphrodite, 25, who describes her work as musical comedy poetry, took her verse out of her bedroom and into open-mic nights 18 months ago. Performing makes her feel “fabulous”. It’s about sharing those raw emotions: “If you write something when you’re massively lonely, and then people relate to it, it goes full circle. It’s like therapy.”
Laura Dockrill, 23, has been a poetic support act at a host of music gigs (for, among others, Martha Wainwright, Peggy Sue and Kate Nash) and is performing at Camp Bestival and Latitude festival. It wasn’t always so: four years ago, her only audience was her mother. Then, inspired by the “boy-band poets” Aisle 16, she realised she too could perform. Knowing what it was like to “have nowhere to go”, Dockrill put an e-mail address on her MySpace page a couple of months ago to which all those secret poets could send their work — she has received more than150 offerings. “People want to get creative themselves,” she says, “though there’s nothing too political. They’re mostly about themselves.”
The medium seems to give women a freedom to express themselves in a way they can’t do anywhere else. As the writer and academic Sarah Churchwell puts it: “Poetry can be about expressing one single emotion — rage, love ... You don’t need a long narrative, with a beginning, middle and end, or an attention span, only your feeling at that moment.” And unlike prose — which Churchwell points out is necessarily “prosaic” — poetry suggests your feeling is of “tremendous importance”.
It’s a sign of the unsettled times: Penelope Gabriel, a 22-year-old actress who has written loads of poems about “the state of the world”, reckons that everyone has so much to say. “I was like a sponge,” she says, “soaking up all these things. Poetry was a way to churn it all out. Reading it back helps me understand what’s in my head.” What does verse do that a diary, or a blog, doesn’t? “This is much more subconscious,” explains Gabriel. “I lose myself in the words. You’re much more conscious of yourself with a diary. Here, it’s just a stream of words.”
She makes it sound so easy — that’s because this new wave is much freer. “It’s not about being perfect,” says Gabriel. “Nobody expects you to have old-school style and structure.” She insists that anyone can have a go: “Everyone’s doing it. It’s the cool thing to do.” Why? Because, she argues, it’s got depth: “Rather than take loads of drugs and listen to some band, you can grasp hold of something with meaning.”
“Meaning” — the zeit-word for 2009. MC Angel, 27, is a performance poet and poetry teacher. She says: “There’s a new tidal wave of consciousness. Everyone wants to express themselves.” And so they are, publishing on Facebook, populating the burgeoning number of open-mic nights, and trying their luck further afield. The inundated arts curator at Latitude, Tania Harrison, equates them to wannabe bands: “A couple of hundred secret poets applied to perform this year. There’s more interest for the poetry tent than any other arena,” she says. “We see a lot of individualistic, intimate musings.”
Hang on, what about the cringe factor? There’s nothing that says “self-absorbed teenager” more than a badly composed poem born of a broken heart. “This generation is not a modest one,” says Todd Swift, a Canadian poet and editor of the poetry page in Selfridges’ recent centenary magazine. “They grew up with reality TV, and now they’re thinking, ‘Why should [reality stars] get all the attention?’ They’re all wondering, ‘Maybe it’s me next.’ ” Could it be you?
Oxford's new professor of poetry should be mad, bad and dangerous to know
May 31st, 2009
The administrators of Oxford University have decided to take some time before choosing their new Professor of Poetry, and who can blame them? Their first two choices, both of whom seemed perfectly natural and attractive at first, have exploded all over the newspapers. Derek Walcott, the 78-year-old Nobel Prize winner and candidate for greatest poet of his age, was ripe to give exactly the kind of broad, sweeping lectures on the life of poetry Oxford expects. His candidacy was derailed by allegations - nothing more than allegations, and all more than 20 years old- that he sexually harassed a student at Harvard. His replacement, Ruth Padel, would have been the first woman to hold the post since it was founded in 1708. She has resigned amid a flurry of accusations that she contributed to the smear campaign against Walcott. It's all so ludicrously bureaucratic. We expect poets to be sinners - that's in the job description. The pettiness of the scandal is what's so upsetting. Harassment? Leaking to the press? That's the kind of lousy behaviour we expect from politicians. Poets should be altogether grander in their vices.
Even in the recent past, poets have managed to be shockingly bad people, or at least to have generated reputations as such. Ted Hughes left a string of wifely suicides, and this was considered, if not normal, then just what one might expect from a demiurge who communed with the deepest spiritual forces and wrestled them into comprehensible language. He became, in a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow no less, a kind of hero of the inexcusable. T.S. Eliot, the great model craftsman of 20th-century verse, shared some of the worst intellectual sins of his era. In 1933, he gave a lecture in Virginia, which included the anti-Semitic morsel, "Reasons of race and religion combine to make any number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." His early poems, which he never published, combined scatological imagery with out-and-out racism.
Such awfulness emerges out of a grand tradition. Charles Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil and patron saint of modern decadence, lived a life of prostitutes, venereal disease and experimentation with hallucinatory drugs. He liked to beg his parents for money so he could go for long lazy strolls through Paris. His example, and the example of countless others who have combined creativity with total irresponsibility, has inspired a huge number of the people who call themselves artists. They work at living like Baudelaire first and don't worry about producing his complete masterpieces until much later.
Before him there was Byron - "mad, bad and dangerous to know," a man whose memoirs were such hot stuff that his literary executor burned them, supposedly for Byron's own good. Now there was a poet with vices that scared his contemporaries: incest and sodomy. In the interests of public morality, Britain refused to bury him in Westminster Abbey when he died (although the Greeks adored him so much that they insisted on keeping his heart). The British authorities did not permit a memorial until 1969, when public morality as a concept disappeared in a poof of light pink smoke.
Now our poets are mostly good guys. They go for long walks. They think about how much people have suffered. They try to heal the world with their language. The exceptions are incredibly rare. Frederick Seidel, who recently released his Collected Poems, is one of my favourites. Since he inherited money - a fact which he frequently discusses in his work - Seidel does not need to please committees of any kind. And so his poem "Dante's Beatrice" contains the horrifying lines "I bought the racer / to replace her. / It became my slave and I its. / All it lacked was tits." From this single quotation, it's safe to assume that Oxford is not going to be considering Seidel for the professorship.
Oxford may well be considering Clive James though. In a recent interview with The Guardian, James gave a brilliant answer when he was asked whether he wanted the post himself: "You know - and this is strictly between you and me and millions of readers - it's the only job I want." It's an answer that contains all the attributes of good poetry: concision, clarity and a perfectly modulated and controlled tone. The words seem spontaneous but also show deep consideration. The sentence communicates all the information required to promote James as a candidate: It is humble; it shows an unfeigned dedication to poetry; it reveals an admirable self-consciousness and awareness of the way the world works and a sense of humour. It's clearly from a genuinely nice guy, the kind of guy you wouldn't mind drinking sherry with after a rather dry meeting in the Senior Common Room.
James's answer isn't poetry, though. It's much too nice for that.
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