Some poets just need to get over themselves

A little rant to end the year.

Back in September 2016, I wrote a silly little poem in protest at the way the CEO of a certain nationally famous pub chain used his influence, and his company’s money, to generate pro-Brexit propaganda which was circulated amongst patrons of his pubs in the run-up to the referendum on leaving the EU. I subsequently posted the poem on my blog page on Write Out Loud, to receive the unexpected accolade of being voted Poem of the Week.

There was nothing solemn or pretentious in the aforementioned Silly Little Poem (which you can read, in all its glory, here). It was a skit – a pastiche – deliberately written in the metre most famously used by Dr Seuss in his comic rhymes for young readers. It was written to let off steam, and maybe raise a laugh. I wouldn’t ever have entered it for the Bridport Prize, or submitted it to a highbrow poetry journal. It’s not that sort of a poem.

I’ve re-posted links to the poem a few times since September 2016, when the pub chain which inspired it has cropped up in Facebook discussions. Most of the time it is received with the sort of droll amusement I hoped it would evoke. But not recently. The last time I mentioned it, a certain poet and Editor of a Respected Online Poetry Journal pounced upon the link and publicly denounced me for choosing to express my ire in the form of a Silly Little Poem. The poem itself came in for some Serious Critique for its “trite rhymes” and childish metre, and I was made to feel somehow kind of sordid for besmirching the good name of poetry by making a political point in such a light-hearted way.

And you know what? This made me angry.

OK, I should have guessed that my post would be read by some Serious Poets. The correspondent to whom I sent the link was a Facebook friend who is himself a Serious Poet of some distinction. He is however someone who has similar political sensibilities to me, and someone whom I know to be not averse to a bit of satire (and to be able to take it in the spirit with which it was intended). I suspected my contribution would raise a smile. I didn’t suspect that the Poetry Police would be scrutinising every word of his Facebook feed for signs of anything that could be seen to suggest that poetry is ever anything other than a Serious Artform. I certainly didn’t expect the sneering, the self-righteousness or the arrogance of the response with which my light-hearted little contribution was met.

In fairness to my friend, I should point out that he was not the source of the response. It came from somebody who followed his page – someone whose name is well known online in the poetry world, and who in my humble opinion really needs to get over himself.

First of all, who gets to dictate what does, and doesn’t, constitute suitable material for poetry? Political points don’t have to be made exclusively through serious poems – in fact, as I’ve argued before on this blog, sometimes the silly poem is more effective by virtue of being memorable for its daft rhymes, or for a refrain that gets lodged in the mind. After all, the satirist’s job is to make the self-important look ridiculous. The poems in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were social and political satires; often they were pastiches of poems and songs of the day, or of well-known poetic styles; they were all very silly. And today they are fondly remembered, they are proudly recited by young and old alike, and some of them even feature in The Nation’s Favourite Poems. Now I’m not saying that my Silly Little Poem has anything to commend it to the extent that Jabberwocky does, but that’s not the point. The point is that you simply can’t say, with any justification, that serious political points can’t be made through light verse. A whole tradition of British poetic writing that encompasses Carroll, Lear, Betjeman, Auden, Roger McGough, John Cooper Clarke, Attila the Stockbroker and Les Barker will prove you wrong.

Secondly, there’s that sniffy assumption often made by Serious Poets, that writers of light verse somehow don’t take their craft seriously. I beg to differ with m’learned friend when he says that the rhymes in my Silly Little Poem are “trite”. I worked bloody hard at those rhymes – and though I say so myself, I think they are effective. The “Dr Seuss” metre requires them to be deployed with the subtlety of a rhinoceros driving a Sherman tank, but that doesn’t mean they are bad rhymes. One of the reasons I love writing Silly Little Poems is that they really make me work at rhyme, scansion and the musicality of a poem; they are great training for the moments when I get the urge and the inspiration to write Serious Poetry. As I’ve blogged before, it takes a great deal of skill to make light verse actually sound light – more than most Serious Free Verse Poets realise.

(Again, read the poem and judge for yourselves. I don’t make any claims as to its literary greatness; I just happen to think I came up with half-decent rhymes that work moderately well).

Lastly, I think I’m just sore at the fellow’s implication that somehow, by writing this stuff, I’m Not a Proper Poet. OK, so it would appear I’m never going to be published in his journal – I think we can be quite Clear about that, can’t we? – but I’ve published a whole collection of (mostly) serious poems and I’ve won 10 First Prizes in UK-wide and international poetry competitions – mostly with serious poems. I shouldn’t have to justify myself. I’ll be a poet in whatever medium I choose, thank you very much. If I choose to write Silly Little Poems, by all means judge the poems, but not the poet. If my output really isn’t for you, then fine – there are plenty of Serious Poets (and some silly ones) whose work I can’t stomach either. But the point is that those words speak to someone. Who are you to silence those words, just because that someone doesn’t happen to be you?

Poetry, politics and That Difficult Second Book

After a frenetic week (and a more than usually busy couple of months), I’m pleased to report to Soapbox readers that my second book is now well and truly launched. Now that I have a minute to catch my breath, this seems like a good time to set down some thoughts on the journey into print for the second time.

Satires is quite a different book to my debut collection. A Long Way to Fall, although praised by one respected poet for its witty qualities, was in essence a serious collection. It was a culmination of seventeen years’ labours at becoming a Serious Poet. Satires is nothing of the sort. The title gives it away; most of the poems in the new book have a heavy element of satire, or at least of social comment. The majority of the pieces are rhyming poems, where A Long Way to Fall was almost entirely free verse. And most of the poems are really rather silly.

So do I see any problems, or contradictions, in going from one to the other?

Well, no – not really. I’ve blogged before about how difficult it is to write good silly poetry, especially in rhyming verse. There’s as much craft in the art of Pam Ayres as there is in that of Carol Ann Duffy. John Betjeman, one of our wittiest British poets, was meticulous in his attention to the musicality of his rhyming verse; there’s scarcely a skip or a stutter in his metre. I’d like to think that I have put as much effort into crafting the whimsical rhyming poems of Satires as I have into the free verse of A Long Way to Fall.

One of the reasons I admire the masters of rhyming verse so much is because it’s often easier to sneak a serious message into an ostensibly silly poem than it is to bludgeon a reader into emotional submission with a poem which tells the tale straight. “A serious message in silly poems” could even be a tagline for Satires. Much more so than in A Long Way to Fall, I was conscious of the social and political landscape in which the poems in the new book are set. The UK has endured five years of what I can only describe as misrule from a Coalition of bankers, economic theorists, consultants, ideologues and millionaires who don’t seem to have the faintest idea what is happening to real people every day. Slashed welfare spending, the near abolition of Legal Aid, the creeping privatisation of the NHS – it all hurts those in our society who are most vulnerable, whilst leaving the men at the top (and they mostly are men) pretty much unruffled. A right-wing media agenda has created a climate where immigrants, benefit claimants and people with disabilities are automatically assumed to be cheats and scroungers, while mega-corporations get away without paying tax and siphon vast (often taxpayer-subsidised) bonuses into the pockets of a new ruling class of fat cats. Meanwhile our schools and universities are being hijacked in a way which allows narrow interest groups to dictate what can be taught, what the next generation is allowed to think. Whether it’s the imposition of fundamentalist religious narratives in so-called “free schools”, or Michael Gove’s attempts to re-package the horrors of World War I as some sort of glorious patriotic misadventure, the end result is a stifling of creativity, a discouragement of critical thinking, and an erosion of the right to question what is being done in our name.

I’ve always believed that poets (and practitioners of all the creative arts) have a responsibility to reflect and comment on the times in which we live – to reinterpret the received wisdom of the day, to question and challenge the propaganda machine. I don’t want to claim some grand socio-political agenda for Satires. The silly poems in the book are there to entertain, primarily. But they are also there as a challenge to the Keep Calm and Carry On generation. I’d far rather produce a book of light entertainment that makes people think a little, than a weighty political diatribe that ultimately preaches only to the converted.

Actually producing Satires was the easy part. When I put together A Long Way to Fall, there were a number of poems in my repertoire which didn’t fit in the collection. The rhyming satirical pieces that remained included a couple of prize winners, so I knew that they weren’t “bad poems”. But they sounded a discordant note in a collection of free verse that was so steeped in nature, folklore and fairy tale. I knew that there could be another use for these poems, and my original plan was to self-publish them as a pamphlet and use the proceeds as a fundraiser for charities working at the sharp edge of Cameron’s so-called Big Society. I was delighted when Rose Drew of Stairwell Books told me that her imprint would be happy to publish the pamphlet for me. That meant I had the clout of a small but well respected publishing house behind Satires: an assurance of the physical quality of the finished product, and of committed editorial input as the collection was finalised.

Satires, in the end, became something midway between a pamphlet and a full collection. Poems kept going in: a few free verse pieces to counterbalance the rhyme, new political satires alongside the older pieces, some socially conscious love poems to provide a variation of tone. Only two poems were dropped. Once production costs have been paid for, all profits from sales are going to homelessness prevention charity Keyhouse, so (sales permitting) Satires will eventually achieve its dual purpose as fundraiser and awareness-raiser. I really couldn’t be happier about the “difficult” second book.

It’s the third one that will require the real hard work...

(Note: Satires is available now from Stairwell Books and can be ordered online by clicking here)