I once commented to a plumber on the popularity of DIY bathrooms. “Everyone’s a plumber these days,” he said, wearily. I sometimes feel the same about poetry criticism.
Take, for example, the recent piece in the Spectator about this year’s National Poetry Competition, run by The Poetry Society, for which 19,000 entries were judged by a panel of three poets.
The headline didn’t hold back:
The Poetry Society has betrayed poetry
Nor did the first paragraph:
The first two prizes have been awarded not to poetry at all.
Really? So what have they been awarded to?
Prose, printed in central blocks on the page, evidently under the impression that this makes them something other than prose.
The mistake made by all involved was then explained:
There is a simple litmus test to tell poetry from prose. Write the words out in a continuum like a newspaper article. You’ll soon spot the difference. Traditionally, poetry has been written in short lines on the page to alert the reader to a change of linguistic pace. It is not just prose broken up into smaller segments with a toffee hammer. Poetry is not prosaic.
Perhaps I just need to sit up straight and pay attention, but it’s not clear to me how writing out a poem like a newspaper article would help you to “spot the difference” between poetry and prose. Although line breaks can have both subtle and emphatic effects when poems are read on the page — especially in modern verse — the “linguistic pace” created by traditional devices such as rhythm, rhyme and metaphor does not evaporate simply because it is no longer marked by lineation. In fact, one of the most popular English poets of the past century, Patience Strong, printed her rhyming lines as little boxes of prose in The Daily Mirror throughout the Second World War, and sold hundreds of thousands of books. Here’s the first paragraph of one:
I assume that Angela Patmore, who wrote the Spectator article, could spot the rhythmical difference between Strong’s cheerful trochaic doggerel (DUM de / DUM de / DUM de / DUM de) and her own column. But if so, I don’t understand why she makes the visual appearance of the winning poems her sole criterion for judging them:
But with the Poetry Society, surely the highest authority on the subject, we have reached the point where mere prose is poetry. All you do is set it out in the middle of the page, perhaps justified to make it look neat like a printer’s block, and shazam! What it actually says doesn’t seem to matter. At least it looks like that shortened stuff.
Shazam? Here, I think, we glimpse the real argument of the piece, which is not about a genuine ignorance of poetic form (I’ll come to this below) — it’s about cultural authority, and who gets to use the magic word “poetry”.
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