Today, poets are their own producers and consumers. This inbreeding has had the consequence that it does in human reproduction. We have a lot of inane and incomprehensible gibbering and exchange going on. But since the industry produces for its own, the industry calls the gibberish, well, poetry. The man in the street, you and I, those ancient consumers, are left baffled, ignored. Can we be held responsible if we consider a Mondeo a sonnet under these circumstances? At least Jac Nasser showed some respect for our likes and dislikes!
Creative writing courses have created an industry in which the output is poetry and the consumers are poets, students and teachers. Where at one time you might have had a great poet intimately familiar with the workings of the human heart, today you have writers who are intimately familiar with what his colleagues think is great poetry. We could call it the Sovietisation of poetry, if you like. Just as the Soviets produced output that no one cared about, which no one wanted, but which satisfied officials and bureaucrats, so today we have poetry no one cares for, but which satisfies the official poets. Technique has replaced soul; sheer linguistic dexterity passes for genius!
Of course, the tendency towards technical sophistication has been evident throughout the twentieth century. The creative writing course was but its logical culmination. And it is no accident that the twentieth century has been the century of The Prize: the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize ... the Nobel Prize. When a writer wins a Nobel, one can be fairly certain that his work is incomprehensible. Adjudication by ‘experts’ has replaced individual taste. One finds it remarkable that a democratic age should tolerate such deference to the opinion of a secretive coterie ensconced in a country that sees no sunlight for six moths of the year!
It may be retorted that expert judgement conduces to excellence. If so, then the poet laureates of the past should all be immortal today. And yet how many poet laureates can one recall? Southey was poet laureate, but not his friend Coleridge; and who reads Southey today? On one or two occasions, the choice of laureate was felicitous; Tennyson, for instance. But how many of these ‘official poets’ survived ‘the night in which suns perished’. And the day is not too far off when these various book prizes will degenerate into another Turner prize, the award for best artwork of the year. “Mother and child’ no longer means ‘Madonna and the infant Jesus’ but a cow and calf preserved in formaldehyde!
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