Five Words that Poets Hate

As people who work with words, it’s only natural that poets can end up in paroxysms of rage at the sight of certain words or phrases. A couple of weeks ago I polled my fellow poets on Facebook for the words that make them most agitated.


1. Corner
Nobody puts Baby in the corner, as fans of Dirty Dancing know only too well. But poets get put in corners All The Time. And this really, REALLY gets my goat.

I suppose it’s a side-effect of that nice little mausoleum in the corner of Westminster Abbey, where some of the great names from poetry’s past are commemorated. But somehow the concept of a ‘Poet’s Corner’ has taken on a metaphorical life far bigger than the actual physical space that bears that name. Poets, admit it. How many times have you been to events where the poets have been relegated to a ‘corner’ because a non-poet organiser has got it into their head that poets and corners are supposed to go together?

I’ll admit to being partially guilty here. The open mic that I’ve been running since 2007 goes by the name of The Speakers’ Corner. But there’s a difference between a Speakers’ Corner (named after the very public corner of London where anyone with anything to say can be heard) and a Poets’ Corner. You see, Speakers’ Corner excepted, a corner is where you put something to ensure it is out of the way. It is the shadowy space where you put that embarrassing ornament that was a gift from your rich aunt (the one you daren’t offend in case you lose the inheritance) but that you secretly hope nobody will notice. It is the outcasts’ space at parties, into which the uncomfortable, the awkward and the conversationally challenged are elbowed by their more socially gifted contemporaries. The corner, in short, is The Place That Doesn’t Fit.

And I rather suspect that that is the real reason why poets are so often relegated to corners. Poetry makes people uncomfortable – and so do poets. And if we’re doing our jobs right, we should be making people uncomfortable. Not by waxing lyrical about daffodils (see below), but by following Goldsmith’s admonition to “let thy voice, prevailing over time, redress the rigours of th’ inclement clime”. There’s a sort of collective moral responsibility on poets to call out the fakes, the falsehoods, the failures of our society and our politics – and I think that deep inside, most people with any cultural awareness have some sense that this is a good thing. The trouble is, most people don’t want us doing that in their backyard, or in their cosy artsy gathering. Much safer to relegate us to the corner, in the hope that people won’t notice we’re there, or will treat us as the oddities to be avoided. Meanwhile the organisers can tick the right box on their Arts Council feedback sheet and get on with their lives without being unsettled by what we do.

2. Scribble
It’s a faux-truism in popular culture that poets don’t write, we scribble. ‘Writing’ is an activity with a semblance of nobility about it. It’s the activity that produced King Lear, or Paradise Lost, or Moby Dick. A weighty activity for weighty men (and yes, the gender bias is significant).

‘Scribble’, by contrast, is what very small children do with coloured pencils before they learn to write proper words. It’s something that predates the idea of actual communication. When applied to adults, the picture it conjures up is one of eccentricity, of haphazard scrawl into dog-eared notebooks or on napkins in cafés. The implication is that the words being ‘scribbled’ are trivial, ephemeral. Or even self-indulgent; the whole essence of ‘scribble’ is that it’s indecipherable to everyone except the person doing the scribbling. So referring to a poet’s writings in this way fosters the stereotype that what poets write is essentially meaningless to anyone but the poet.

I have to admit, though, this is a word that divided my Facebook poets. One or two of them pointed out that they often do scribble stuff when they go about their day – and most poets are familiar with the syndrome of being far away from notebook or laptop and having a sudden urge to capture a fleeting line or an image that must be written down before it escapes. Even if that means scrawling it on a napkin, or on the back of your hand.

But as my regular correspondent (and fine poet) Angela Topping points out, it’s one thing for us poets to refer to these contextless scrawls as scribble, and another thing altogether for a non-poet to describe the whole of our creative process that way.

3. Wordsmith
This one divided opinion even more than ‘scribble’. Some were entirely comfortable with it – others hated it with a visceral passion.

One or two of my correspondents added a whole pile of synonyms, with which they were equally uncomfortable. ‘Scribe’ and ‘wordweaver’ were particularly unpopular.

Why do these phrases attract such bile? There’s a slightly archaic, artisanal feel to them, which makes me think they are the kind of words that rich people who like to pretend that they’re cultured would use out of condescension, rather than genuine admiration for the craft. In these words the poet is cast in the role of skilled manual labourer – the verbal equivalent of a potter, or a rug-maker. It suits those who like to appear cultured to have the pot or the rug in their mansion (or the book in their library), but they would never want to get their hands dirty trying out the artisan’s craft for themselves. So they dignify the craft with a fancy title and it makes them feel that the world is ordered just the way they like it: the rich man in his castle, the poet at his gate.

It’s worth mentioning, at this point, some of the other detested phrases that often get bundled together with ‘poet’. ‘Impoverished’ was one. ‘Arty’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘dreamer’ were also in the mix. Again, all these are words which set up the stereotype of the poet as one of the noble, hard-working poor – much as if to say, well it’s all very nice to have them, but you wouldn’t actually want to be one, would you?

4. Award-winning
This is another one that I’m guilty of myself. Let’s face it, 90% of poets’ CVs contain the phrase. And therein lies the problem. When almost any poet you meet can describe themselves as ‘award-winning’, it’s obvious that being award-winning doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. As the great Len Goodman once said, awards are like piles – every arse gets them eventually.

Why do so many of us persist in describing ourselves as ‘award-winning’? I think the answer to that is that we are constantly having to justify ourselves, and our art. Very few poets have a queue of people at their door, wanting to hear their words. Most of us, if we want to be taken seriously, have to get out there and sell ourselves to a largely indifferent world. And in my experience, that’s not something which many poets are good at. There are one or two honourable exceptions (my York contemporary Miles Salter, for example, has a talent for self-promotion that I really envy). But most of us find that we need to stake our claim to being a Serious Poet by constantly referencing those pesky awards, whether they’re the Bridport Prize or our local writers’ group’s annual limerick competition. They are one of the few objective measurements we can cling to, to show that we are Any Good.

But even being award-winning is no guarantee of recognition. The extraordinary Pat Borthwick, for example, has won almost every major poetry award out there, and tells me that she still struggles to get bookings. Which sometimes makes me wonder, if Pat has difficulty, what hope is there for the rest of us?

5. Poetry
I’ve saved the most controversial word for last. But the person who proposed it was quite adamant about this one. It’s a “pigeonholing misrepresentation”, I was told. And I have to admit, that somewhat flummoxed me.

So is it true? Are poets really ashamed, embarrassed or angered to be associated with poetry?

I’ve pondered this at great length since. And I don’t think that it’s the whole corpus of poetry that’s being slagged off here, but rather what my correspondent eloquently described as a “pompous white-ruffled airy arty farty stereotype”. The point was made that there is a way of presenting poetry which is intrinsically ‘uncool’ and which does sometimes irreparable damage to people’s appreciation of poetry, often at a very young age. Poetry was something, says my correspondent, that people just “didn’t do” when he was at school.

I can’t really argue with that. I’ve blogged before about the dreadful negative impact of Wordsworth’s Daffodils on generations of schoolchildren – and the even worse impact that over-sentimental rehashings of Daffodils have on the credibility of poetry as an art form (it’s probably worth mentioning that the word ‘daffodils’ had its own nomination in this survey!). However, I’m far from comfortable with the notion that this means the very word ‘poetry’ is intrinsically devalued amongst those of us who write and perform the stuff. If anything, perhaps the opposite is true.

Poetry is not something which ever had aspirations to be ‘cool’ (except for possibly a year or two in the Beat era). In the UK at least, it certainly hasn’t ever been ‘trendy’ in my lifetime. But what good poetry has going for it is a certain counter-cultural quality. That’s why Goldsmith described poetry as “my shame in crowds, my solitary pride”. That’s part of the reason why it continues to attract such a high proportion of geeks, goths and misfits of all kinds (and long may it continue to do so). Pretty much all the performing poets I know are proud to call themselves poets; that word represents an artistic, cultural and political standpoint very different to the societal norms of capitalism, tribalism and conformity.

But I have met other poets who are still embarrassed to think of themselves as poets. They bring out their notebooks almost shyly at open mics. They share their words hesitantly. And it’s not because the words are bad – they never are. It’s because when they have admitted to friends, family members, sometimes even partners, that they have been writing poetry, they have had their art ridiculed, or dismissed as unimportant.

If you’re one of these people, then this post is for you. The word ‘poetry’ is on this list because poetry matters. Don’t hate that word. Be proud of it. Immerse yourself in it. It is a truly soul-crushing thing, when those closest to you just don’t understand why it matters to you. But there are hundreds and thousands of us who do get it. Seek us out. Be poets with us. We will do what we can to make your life better. To help you be proud of who you are.

And not a single daffodil will be harmed in the process.

Political poetry: is it any good?

I have my fabulous poetic ally and Speakers’ Corner co-host, Laura Munteanu, to thank not only for the photo that accompanies this month’s blog post, but for the subject matter too. It was a Facebook discussion on, of all things, the death of Christopher Lee (a splendid man but a well-known Tory) which started a debate about whether or not ‘political’ poetry is any good. As a poet who has taken a step firmly inside the political arena myself with my second collection Satires, I suspect this is a subject I ought to have strong feelings on.

And I do – sort of.

Those who expressed their dislike of ‘political’ poetry made the valid point that often the political poem gets cheered more for its political than its poetic qualities. You stand up at a poetry slam and perform an anti-racist poem, or something about female empowerment or (to go back a blog post or two) the demerits of UKIP, and you’re going to get cheered. This is stuff that poetry audiences want to hear – hell, it’s stuff that I want to hear! But I’ve got to be honest, most of it is ephemeral. It’s intended to be ephemeral. The sincere hope of the audiences (and, I suspect, of the performers) is that one day soon society will have changed for the better and the protest poems won’t be necessary.

So it doesn’t really matter if the poetics aren’t up to the standards of Shakespeare, or the Forward Prize. If the poem makes the audience think, creates solidarity, encourages activism, and gives us all a glimpse (however brief) of a better world, the poem has done its job.

I have plenty of poems like that. Most of them are unpublished, and likely to stay that way. A few made it into Satires – but to be honest I wish I’d been able to retire these poems with the 2015 general election. Unfortunately for the poetic community (as well as our wider civic society), the election result almost certainly means these poems have at least another 5 years’ life in them.

But as a poet I’m concerned about craft, and aesthetics, and reaching a wider audience – perhaps one not directly affected by the situations I’m writing about. So can ‘political’ poems be poetically, as well as politically, pleasing? Can they – and should they – outlast the events they purport to chronicle?

I suppose it all depends what you mean by a political poem. I tend towards the opinion that everything has a political dimension. The conditions in which we grew up, the jobs we do, how we spend our leisure time (if we’re lucky enough to have leisure time), what we do with our money (if we’re lucky enough to have money), how we bring up our families, and the circumstances of our last days on earth – these are all subjects with a political as well as a personal dimension. The simple facts of whom we love, and how we express that love – surely the oldest poetic subjects of all? – have never been more politicised than they are today, with recent landmark decisions about marriage equality across the world, and an inevitable phobic backlash. About the only way you can avoid being political is by opting out of society altogether and going and sitting on a rock – and even that could be seen as a political gesture, a rejection of modernity and all that comes with it.

I certainly approached the poems in Satires with an awareness that everything is political. The love poems in the collection are set firmly in austerity Britain. I spend my working week with households at the sharp end of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, and yet who find ways of living and loving and being family, even in the teeth of benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and the food bank. It was their lives, which seem to matter so little to the people in power, that I wanted to celebrate – just as, two and a half centuries earlier, Oliver Goldsmith celebrated the ordinary lives of the rural poor displaced by the landowners in The Deserted Village, for me the finest political poem ever written.

The love poems in Satires WEREN’T originally created as political or social comment. They were created as love poems. But that’s the great thing about poetry. What we write is so infused with our environment and life experiences that subtexts creep in unbidden. All the most well worn subjects for poets – love, childhood, the seasons – can give birth to political poems, even if the politics isn’t the original inspiration for the poem (there are probably a few political cat poems out there, though I must confess I struggle to think of any!).

So what now for the political poets? Well, we’ve no shortage of stuff to write about. In the UK another Tory axe is looming over the welfare state, the NHS, education and the justice system. Meanwhile, billions are pumped into an obsolete nuclear deterrent that’s a bigger threat to the citizens of our own country than to their supposed enemies. Worldwide, society has never been so unequal. War, exploitation of women and environmental degradation are at the forefront of every news bulletin. Poets should be commenting on such things – but how to comment in a way that means the poet’s voice is taken seriously?

There’s certainly a place for rabble rousing poetry. But as noted above, it mainly tends to get cheered by those who agree with the political sentiments. An alternative – and arguably more effective – tool for the poet is satire. Satirical poetry can even be appreciated by the intended target, if it has the right amount of wit and is sufficiently well constructed. Think of Pope, Wilde, Goldsmith (again) – or the late great Ronnie Barker.

But perhaps the poet’s most powerful weapon is the eye for the unexpected detail. Poetry which is (on the surface at least) primarily observational can often stand long after the events it is observing have passed into history. The war poetry of Wilfred Owen is a supreme example. Owen certainly rails against the establishment that sent his comrades to slaughter, but it’s not his rants that make his work so powerful. It’s the observational stuff: the gas attack likened to a drowning in the sea, the “white eyes writhing” in the corpses piled on the wagon afterwards. The message of these stark images has endured far longer than the trenches, the poppy fields, and the establishment that Owen and his contemporaries went to their deaths to defend.

The Meaning of Meaning

A few years ago, the judge of one of the big poetry competitions was roundly lambasted in the literary press for a judge’s report that began “What I liked about the winning poem was its ambiguity.” Noooo, screamed the correspondents. A poem is an attempt to convey something profound to an audience. If the audience can’t grasp the meaning – if the poem is ambiguous, obscure, or open to diverse interpretation – then surely the poem has failed at the first hurdle?

I was reminded of this discussion recently. In his recently published “Top 10 Tips for Being a Successful Poet” (which are really tips for how to prepare the mind and heart so that you are in a state which is receptive to the possibility of poetry happening – a subtle but important distinction), Andrew Motion states that “people will interpret your poetry in different ways, but provided the interpretation that is brought to the poem isn’t plainly bonkers, I actually enjoy that.”

This statement elicited a strong response from my literary sparring partner Tim Ellis, who retorted: “I never write a poem unless I have something I want to say, and if people interpret my words differently I consider the poem a failure.” And that really set me thinking.

I wrestled with a similar problem earlier in my poetic career. At that time, a rather lovingly crafted descriptive poem of mine had just been Highly Commended in one of the bigger competitions. I was proud of the success. But when I read the judge’s report, I was perturbed to discover that the judge had inferred a subtext within the poem which I had never intended. The subtext he’d ‘found’ was about bereavement – not exactly a minor issue. In fact, owing to the subject matter of the poem, I was initially a little upset to realise that the judge had interpreted it this way.

What followed was a bit of a crisis of confidence about my integrity as a poet. After all, aren’t poets supposed to tell the truth, at least as they perceive it to be? If people were reading my poem as a poem about bereavement – if, indeed, it had won its competition place on the strength of an assumption that it was about bereavement – then wasn’t there something intrinsically dishonest about the poem? And wouldn’t there be something even more dishonest about me putting the poem forward in future poetry readings, knowing that at least some of the audience were likely to interpret it that way?

It took a very wise poetry tutor to explain to me that that didn’t mean the poem (or the poet) wasn’t truthful. The very fact that the poem was open to an interpretation other than the one I’d intended was a sign of the power of the poem to take on a life beyond the person who had written it. Those who subsequently read, or heard, the poem were free to draw out meanings from the poem which resonated with them. The poem was no longer constrained by the fairly narrow sphere of my own observations, thoughts and feelings; it could land in somebody else’s heart and have a whole new meaning for them, independently of me. And that, if I’m honest, was something a little bit awe-inspiring, and very humbling.

This is exactly the same reason I love modern art, and folk music. In both of these art forms, there’s seldom an obvious contemporary meaning to the artwork. Modern art and traditional songs and stories are at their most powerful when their meaning isn’t tied to the person who created them. Other people can come and interact with and, to an extent, reinterpret the artwork. Thus, fairy tales take on new meanings which resonate with the concerns of the contemporary society. The tales of King Arthur have been constantly rewritten for the changing times, from the age of high chivalry in Malory, through the vehement anti-war satire of TH White, to Monty Python’s surrealist whimsy. We are far more aware of the undercurrent of, say, sexual violence in Little Red Riding Hood or domestic abuse in Cinderella than were the audience of fifty years ago, or a hundred. And one reason why I love the Yorkshire Sculpture Park so much is that the Henry Moores and Barbara Hepworths there can be touched, climbed over, peeked through and hidden behind; their meaning is constantly reinterpreted by children of all ages finding new ways to interact with these magnificent sculptures, new games to play with them.

For me, a really good poem has a similar quality to those stories and sculptures. It can also be played with by the reader, or listener. They can see aspects of their own lives, or their landscape and history, in a new light by seeing them through the poem’s lens. So there doesn’t have to be one, absolute, inviolable meaning to a poem for it to be a success. Even an overtly contemporaneous political rant, if well written, can resonate long after the events which incited the poet to put pen to paper have become yesterday’s news. Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village was written in response to the effect of the Enclosure Acts on rural populations, but the workers of mischief in the poem seem disturbingly familiar in an age of austerity, benefit cuts and food banks.

There has to be some meaning though. There are poets who take ambiguity to an extreme, and produce poetry so obscure that no one can dig out any meaning from their words. Or, perhaps worse, only those with doctorates in literature can decipher them. Ambiguity as a poetic tool fails when its effect is to exclude the readers, instead of inviting them in.

Unfortunately, judging by the content of certain journals I could name, there are still one or two poetry editors who haven’t realised this...

Ten Poems that Changed my Life

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 86 of NAWG LINK)

I'd like to pass on one of the best pieces of writing advice I've received. If you find the writing doesn't come, don't stress about writing – READ instead. Read your favourite things, the stuff that really inspires you. Immerse yourself in it, for weeks or months if necessary. Over time, those treasured writings will start to stir your subconscious, and get your imagination on the road to fruitfulness again.

I'll go a step further. Many people have a musical Top Ten, or a list of "songs that changed their life". So why not seek out the ten poems that changed your life, and use these as the starting-point for your literary therapy? Don't just list them – think about how and why they changed your life, why they're still meaningful today. Read them, again and again. Luxuriate in them.

I'll get you going by telling you a bit about ten poems that changed my life.

The first one goes back to my infant years, and Brian Cant (I think) on Play School (more than likely) reciting Wilma Horsbrugh's The Train to Glasgow. This has everything a perfect child's poem should have: it's full of rhythm and rhyme, delightful repetition, lovely unusual words, and it's really, really funny. I can still recite it today.

I have my Mum to thank for unleashing the storytelling power of poetry on me at an early age. Her eerie recitation of Edward Lear's fantastical ballad The Dong with a Luminous Nose is one of my earliest memories. She filled it with such weird musicality that it used to terrify me as a child; today, I consider it the finest gothic romantic poem ever written.

Roger McGough's First Day at School was another much-quoted childhood treasure. I didn't realise it at the time, but this was my first encounter with free verse. No less rhythmical or musical than The Train to Glasgow or The Dong, it's a joy to read aloud.

I came across Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village when I was 16, studying English Literature O-level. I have Irish heritage and this poem took me right back to where my ancestors might have started out. It was a blast of fierce political rhetoric, lambasting the establishment of the day for ruining a land and its inhabitants in the name of what we'd now call capitalism. At a time when my social and political conscience was still being formed, it stood strong alongside the repertoire of protest songs I was discovering.

O-level English Lit. also introduced me to Tennyson's The Lotos Eaters. Tennyson was well and truly part of the establishment that Goldsmith loathed. But he was a lyrical genius. Not only was this a slice of epic storytelling in a tradition that I loved, but it was one of the most musical things I'd ever heard (it demands to be read aloud).

After Tennyson, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was a shock to the system! I blame a theatrical production by a university friend, not long after I moved away from home, for introducing me to this incredible piece of writing. I hardly understood any of it; at the same time I was mesmerised. The words, the chants, the half-glimpses of meaning wove a spell around me like nothing I'd experienced before. Suddenly I knew it didn't matter if I didn't always understand poetry, I loved it just the same.

J.R.R. Tolkien isn't best known for his poetry. A cursory glance at the form and structure of his Mythopoeia shows a number of stylistic weaknesses. But these didn't matter to me when I discovered that behind the shaky iambic pentameters lay the best excuse for imagination, ever! The poem was Tolkien's response to an argument with C.S. Lewis when Lewis was still an atheistic rationalist who sneered at storytelling and myth as "lies". Tolkien's defence of the storyteller's art was satirical, inspirational, and even a little prophetic when you consider the struggle that writers and dreamers still face against the dumbing-down of the world. The central stanza is a call to arms for poets and all creative writers to keep their eyes open, keep dreaming and marvelling at the wonder of the universe: "He sees no stars who does not see them first / of living silver made that sudden burst / to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song / whose very echo after-music long / has since pursued. There is no firmament, / only a void, unless a jewelled tent / myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth, / unless the mother's womb whence all have birth."

I’ve loved and lingered over almost all of Carol Ann Duffy's collections over the years, and have been lucky enough to hear her read a number of times. Our new Poet Laureate deserves to be represented in this list, though I struggle to settle on a favourite from her vast repertoire. The famous Valentine, a brilliant subversion of the classical love poem, is an obvious choice. But if pushed I think I might have to go for Star and Moon from the Meeting Midnight collection. A poem written for a close friend of the poet and for her unborn child, it has a breathtaking intimacy that I long to be able to emulate in my own poetry.

I was just beginning (unsuccessfully) to send my poems out to competitions when I discovered Diana Syder's Hubble. In my day job I'm a research scientist, and I'm acutely aware of how infrequently the scientific world and the poetic world overlap. It's not that they have no connection – more, perhaps, that many poets don't know how to make the connection. Syder, an astrophysicist, astonished me with her hymn of praise to the Hubble Space Telescope – and put a healthy dose of childlike wonder back into both poetry and science.

Just one more to choose: and for my last one I'll select something that brings me full circle, in Roger McGough's Poem for the Opening of Christ the King Cathedral, Liverpool, 1967. I grew up in Birkenhead, and the unique shape of "Paddy's Wigwam" sat on the skyline throughout my childhood. It symbolises family, community, my roots, and my faith. McGough, fellow Merseysider, catches the spirit of it perfectly.

There you have it. My poetry jukebox, or Ten Poems that Changed My Life. Which ten poems would you choose?