Chris Murray

Recently, I wrote a post about how government bodies tend to view poetry. Indeed, I would say their view tends toward jaundiced misunderstanding rather than outright aggression, but I could be wrong. The image embedded in the piece was of a woman placing flowers  at Ted Hughes‘  memorial stone in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.

Ted Hughes’ stone was placed in close proximity to that of  T.S Eliot‘s in the Abbey. Eliot, the banker, the poet, and the editor of Faber and Faber  mentored and supported Hughes throughout his career. Eliot’s writing was of the monumental type, and clearly directed to posterity, it lacked intimacy. I will admit that I do like Eliot. Especially in his play, Murder in the Cathedral. I have for years tangled with the voices of the women, the chorus. This then is poetic-posterity. These women of Canterbury are doom-sayers, they are the Greek chorus. They are ignored and later chided for their melodramatic utterances. They are however heard and regarded by the martyr Thomas À Becket. I have added a section of the recording here for those interested in how T.S Eliot used the women.

I find it quite difficult to relate to women characters that are written by men, as there is an absence somewhere that I regard as experiential. I think maybe that Anna Livia Plurabelle by James Joyce has a similar resonance to the Canterbury women written by Eliot. There is a quality of universalism in words mouthed by women, but written by men. The woman’s experience and perspective is absent, this hardly matters to a newspaper commissioning editor or poetry editor, as they believe that a male poet can voice a woman’s experience just as well as the woman could herself. And therein lies the problem: the established male writer in whom a lot of money has been invested is likely better than a woman writer at things because he has been put on a plinth by the old boys and there he will stay head-stuffing on all subjects for a bored media who hate the arts anyway. He can even aspire to the godly and they will lap it up and reward it.

Posterity seems to have increasing importance to those writers who have criticised Carol Ann Duffy in recent weeks. It took 341 years for the English people to countenance a woman laureate, then her laureateship is attacked by the guardians of poetic dogma, who not once sought to define (say) Ted Hughes’ Laureateship,

“Conversely, Carol Ann Duffy’s work which speaks so clearly to many today may seem stale to posterity. I have no idea whether this would distress her.” (Allan Massie)

The idea of poetic posterity being defined by intellect is risible. The life of a poem is defined by the resonance of the image (or images) that are captured within the form of the poem. It is not a question of the perceived intellect of the poet, but of how the poem illuminates the reader. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill‘s images are fine hewn and unforgettable, as are Plath’s, as are the images created by Anna Akhmatova, by Margaret Fuller, by Stevie Smith, or by Ágnes Nemes Nagy. The fact that a certain coterie of critics are glued to the idea of posterity whilst mistranslating the idea of popularity (or populism) wholly misses the point of poetry. It is not about how wordy and intellectual the poet, but how the poetic image can adapt and move with the reader through their lifetime and be always different and always challenging.

Government appointed funders do not recognise the place of poetry in our post-literate society. Political artifice dominates popular media and culture. I have never been so bored with the empty drone and bitching of it. I have never understood why men in suits whose drone tone shows a spectacular boredom are mirrored by a craven and fussy media. Evidently boredom is de rigeur for the modern male. It’s a mystery to me why people glue themselves to televisions watching the latest bitchy power struggle or political scandal. Their words are dead wood and they reek of impotence to be frank about it.

I am adding here two excerpts of poems/prose which I will properly attribute next week. I want the reader to investigate the images and form therein,  and then possibly wonder at how stupidly gendered and egotistical the intellectual poets’ profound disconnect with their reader actually is become.

Poetry and Poetic Prose, two excerpts.

Excerpt #1.

Trees

Learn. The winter trees.
Hoarfrosted crown to root.
Immovable curtains.
 .
And learn too of the zone
where a crystal steams
and trees merge into mists,
as the body in recollection of it.

Excerpt #2

‘Posterity and all that‘ by C Murray/Poethead is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at poethead.wordpress.com.