There's a Flap On

The BBC4 programme A Poet's Guide to Britain has been very good with analyses of various little-heard poems which have all been up there with the greats. Last night's programme was about Woods by Louis MacNeice which has a depth that I cannot begin to describe. You have to read it, though I cannot find it for a link. However, that is not the main idea hear - rather the rude interruptions of verses by various modern poets asked to comment on the main feature. These have served to do nothing other that to contrast the depth and plain craft of the historical subjects when compared with the tiny wit of these short and grating wannabe poems. It struck me that over the years, contemporary poetry has gradually removed all the elements, any one of which defines writing as poetry. First to go was rhyme which we can happily do without - Rhyme in anything other than skilled hands, does nothing other than distract from real meaning. Next on the hit list was scansion - again not so much a loss, though rhythm might be seen as pretty much essential to a good poem by most people, it is still possible to make a jaw-dropping poem with something which other than its content is just prose (non-prosaic prose perhaps). However, these little interjections in the show seem to have finally removed the last spark of poetry which is the poeticism. In the struggle to avoid cliche, to seem different, the avant-garde now write poems without any poetic hook, without the "hello-clouds-hello-sky" moments I suppose. So we have progressed beyond playing tennis without the net to playing it without the rackets or ball. To stretch the analogy, some modern poetry is just walking around. Maybe this reflects what has happened in art - if crumpled paper or lights turning off and on can be art then random, scansion-free sentences can be poetry. Even EJ Thribb has some go at making the random splits in his prose give the lines some sort of flow.

Then again you may want to throw my recent efforts such as "A Goth in Mufti" back at me. I have an excuse.