What is Mainstream Poetry? Part 2: To be struck by the world

A continuation

In my last essay, I made a set of claims about ‘mainstream poetry’ in the UK, which might be summarised as follows:

1. The distinction between mainstream poetry and more ‘innovative’ varieties of poetry in Britain has become much fuzzier over the last 15 years or so.

2. While the two tendencies c.2000 grounded their arguments for the kind of poetry they write in either claims about nature (what is ‘scientifically’ real, or merely common sense), or claims about history, the distinction between nature and history has itself become fuzzy for most writers of contemporary poetry.

3. This fuzziness is a way of reckoning with, or merely triggered by, a crisis in ‘the natural world’, which is also a crisis of historicity, and of capitalism.

4. That is to say, the connections that poets feel between themselves and history (not just as in tradition/the past, but as in purposeful social action) are weakening or have grown impossibly complex.^[1] At the same time, the standard poetic conception of what the natural world is, and how it touches us has likewise increased in complexity.

5. I think the current impasse, in which few people make strong claims for the rightness of their grounding principles, is bad for the practice of the art.^[2]

6. It has largely resulted in a mainstream poetry that is more intellectually ‘coherent’ than its predecessors without being more successful. In many instances, it has become overdependent on certain ecological frameworks that resolve necessary poetic antagonisms too easily.

Today’s essay is mostly an attempt to convince you of point 6. Part of it is a brief review I wrote for PN Review, of two collections of poetry published in 2024, and which I think speak to this argument, but I have tried to thread this into a larger narrative.

1.

One thing writers tend to struggle with is the question of what matters. This much they have in common with everyone else. But just imagine being a poet. For the most part, you are driven by a variety of compulsions that result from sensitivity. Perhaps that is to the sounds of words, or the feelings of them in the mouth. Perhaps it is to your own bodily dispositions, your joy, shame, anxiety, need, etc. Perhaps it is to your own memories, their vivid afterglow. Probably it is to all of these and more, and uniting them a kind of sensation of rightness when it feels like these things coincide. And yet, does this coincidence matter? A poem comes right with a click like a closing box. But then what?

For many poets, the point of finding words is to make something shareable. You don’t exactly want to make everyone feel sorry for your break-up. It is rather that in that break-up, or tragedy, or loss, there seems to be some truth, for want of a better word, that you think would benefit others to know. The point is not just to convey how an experience felt, but that it seemed to matter.

And yet, as the artform evolves alongside wider social life, there is always a kind of pushback against that mattering—every new justification, every new style of poem that makes something matter, it seems, is eventually dispelled. An eloquent version of this history is offered in the critic Charles Altieri’s book Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. There he frames modernist poetry via what philosophers call the is-ought problem/gap, showing how poets have sought to make present values, rather than feelings by increasing the abstraction, the impersonality of their poems. The conceptual genealogy, however, isn’t initially necessary for understanding the problem. You can get at it with a hypothetical situation:

You’re looking at a beautiful lake. You turn to your companion and you say, isn’t that lake beautiful. They say, what do you mean. You say, it’s the most beautiful lake I’ve ever seen. And they say why? And you offer a description of the lake, of its peach pellucidity in the sunset, etc. But this does not work. Nothing you say can compel assent. Yet you cannot give up. The fact that you even have to tell someone else is proof of something, surely, that exceeds your mere feelings, that is not ‘your reaction’ to the world, but in the world itself. The difference between what we call aesthetic experiences, truly, and simple matters of taste, is that in the former we think that we have been spoken to by the world, and that other people could stand to listen, too. If someone tells me they don’t like the taste of coriander, I don’t explain to them why they’re wrong. But if they say they hate sunsets, I think it genuinely is a different matter.

Sometimes, a poem might even be about this problem, about when you fail to feel what you think you ought. Consider Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’.

All this long eve, so balmy and serene,

Have I been gazing on the western sky,

And its peculiar tint of yellow green:

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;

Those stars, that glide behind them or between,

Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew

In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;

I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

The search for assent to feeling, to shared feeling, is what undergirds TS Eliot’s claim about the objective correlative. Modernist poetry more generally, dreamed, like him of ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’ You see it and you have to feel it.

Altieri tells a story that seeks to explain why one seeks assent. Modern ways of describing the world do not believe that ‘values’, judgements about what matter, reside in nature—scientific description is by definition value-free. To describe an experience, therefore, says nothing about its value. You cannot make it matter. That murder makes people sad tell us nothing about what we ought to do. The fact that you felt the need to break up with your boyfriend tells us nothing about whether or not humans ought to love.

They didn’t worry about how description might compel recognition in the 14^th century. Nature was the book of God. When it ceases to be that, then we are left alone with our feelings. We struggle to explain why anything matters. But still it moves.

And so poets have sought to find ways to close the gap. Some hope this way to justify a political or ethical vision, others don’t. For Altieri, the point is to demonstrate some kind of human capacity, and the power of the poetic imagination to ground a shared set of values, a public sphere. But I think an idea animating art—not the motive for a work’s making, but the condition which makes that motive express itself in the kinds of art we have now— is that if it can compel assent, genuinely, then it might falsify the idea of an indifferent universe.

2.

But poets, especially those who accept a purely naturalistic description of reality, cannot believe in objective correlatives as bridges across any kind of gap between fact and value. One way of thinking of the once dominant mainstream aesthetic in British poetry is the translation of ‘value’ into feeling. It matters to you, and maybe the best we can do is empathise; we all matter. To ourselves at least.

By the end of the 20^th century, I think, the straightest route to success for a poet, who didn’t want to have to deal with cumbersome metaphysics, was to make a drama out of the split between self and world. So: you would write a poem where there is a kind of pathos generated by trying and failing to find the world in genuine dialogue with your feelings. You would go looking for a symbol, some way of undeniably embodying an experience and its attendant feelings so that all would recognise it. You would end up empty-handed. Your poem’s final image would be one of contingency, of the failure of the image to be a symbol for anyone other than yourself.

However, this search would garner sympathy, as we all know, if nothing else, this same feeling, of a world that is in some sense indifferent to us. We all know that our personal feelings are important to us. We all know that people matter. We admire the poet for trying to prove it, and making pleasant patterns in the pursuit.

I’ve written before about how Thomas Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’ is a perfect early embodiment of this set of claims, claims which I think, echoing Donald Davie in his extremely still relevant book With the Grain, can be read as a kind of affirmation of the basic claim of liberalism—what is good is not knowable, but what we know is that individuality is the precondition for any unshareable experience of goodness. Everybody counts because they are an individual.

Moving on to the prehistory of the present, one of the most beautiful versions of this gesture of individual-symbol making I know is Paul Muldoon’s magnificently casual empty-handedness in his poem ‘Something Else’. There the poet sees a lobster in a tank in a restaurant, and then thinks:

of how Nerval

was given to promenade

a lobster on a gossamer thread,

how, when a decent interval

had passed

(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)

and his hopes of Adrienne

proved false,

he hanged himself from a lamp-post

with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

It’s a great poem, I think. But if you were to ask what it is saying about the world—it is that there is no order that is not imposed, that is not in some sense arbitrary as those lovely fake rhymes. The poet’s own, presumably romantic disappointment (it is ‘your lobster’, he sees and which triggers this story of ‘Romantic’ desperation), finds its symbol only in the endless chains of possible substitutions. Perhaps we see in this desire, or despair, or meaninglessness. But what we don’t see is some connection between the lobster and the love. Their resemblances are a matter of indifference.

So what if we wanted to argue, then, that this, as with the Craig Raine poem I discussed before, is too easy. Rather than failing to find symbols, isn’t the real job of the poet to find them? If I don’t think that one person’s yearnings over a nice dinner matter very much, what am I meant to take from the poem? What does it give me beyond empty generalities (we long for connection and don’t have it) and this skilled attempt to yoke that to the anecdote? Where is the world outside Paul Muldoon’s head in this poem?

I think the poem survives such criticism. Maybe I’ll even argue that at length one day. But I want to suggest that this line of attack—the anecdote isn’t even trying to make others see the value of the experience, is one that is in some sense profoundly felt by the post 2010 generation of poets publishing with commercial presses. These are poets who are very concerned that their own anecdotes do carry the weight of the world. For better or worse, that makes them emblematic of contemporary mainstream poetry.

3.

In the work of many of our most ambitious ‘mainstream’ poets, we might say, the problem is that the anecdote itself cannot take for granted the value or the purchase of individual experience in the way that Muldoon does, it cannot accept its basic liberalism. Muldoon makes no claims, draws no authority from his experience to speak of how we ought to behave or what we ought to do, but he does suggest that we are interested in this experience because, in a certain sense, life is like this.

But is it? Various intellectual currents would say that this kind of subject-centred experience is not a real description of the world. Others might argue that less of a gap between individual experience and values when we consider whose lives are seen to matter. One thing that poets have done, then, is incorporate these criticisms into their anecdotal frame. Among my contemporaries, perhaps the most common ways this has been done is through a mediating term such as race or gender—something which de-individuates the individual, and gives certain experiences a weight, connects them straightforwardly to the world of values. It is not just anyone looking at a lake, it is the bearer of certain historical positioning. An obvious example might be Jason Allen Paisant’s Thinking with Trees, where you find eclogue interleaved with injunctions not to take its descriptions as ‘general nature’:

you must

try to imagine daffodils

in the hands of a black family

on a black walk

in spring

What matters to my argument, however, is not so much the specific content of the various criticism of liberal humanism, universalism, subject-object dualism, etc that have become more popular among poets. What matters is their function. In contemporary mainstream poetry, the critiques themselves serve as a way to maintain the anecdote, the search for shareability in personal experiences while swapping out the old mainstream ontological claims for a different, more socially responsible vision of reality.

Perhaps this can be most clearly glimpsed not in discussions of race, or gender, but in the ways that poets have sought to reframe nature itself (often to get to these discussions of race or gender in more complex ways). If we jettison one set of claims about the ‘value’ of individual experience, perhaps we can reintroduce others by adopting a new view of nature—this way we are still talking about our experiences of the world, not just of language or history, but we are accepting that all of these things are entangled in ways that actually make our personal experience, once again, value-bearing. We no longer have to be modern. We no longer have to live in the gap. We can ask ourselves ‘what if we had never been modern?’

Such questions, I think, redound in interesting ways in 21^st century British poetics, wherein you can glimpse huge claims about the way the world is in poems that might otherwise be suspected of being—like Paul Muldoon’s above—a little lightweight.

4.

Daisy Larfarge’s Life Without Air, for example, is a book that I think is one of the most fully articulated and coherent efforts to justify its attachments to personal experience. In this, I want to suggest, it is ‘mainstream’ poetry; all of its experiments are in service of regrounding mainstream poetics—in which language refers to the world, rather than to its own historical condition—in a different conception of nature.

The collection uses its conception of the natural world to map out different kinds of toxicity, ecological and emotional, not by suggesting that they are analogous, but suggesting that they share common substances, both discursive and natural. Probably the central poem in the book, ‘The Tatou Lake’ , is a sequence that sets up a parallel that is not a parallel. The eponymous poison dumping ground, a lake in Mongolia ruined by the mining of rare earth minerals for phone batteries etc, is not standing in for, or suggesting a failed relationship of the speaker. Rather the lake is consubstantial with it, and with our relationship to toxicity itself. The reservoir of bad feeling is not less in the world than the leaching of contaminants. They directly touch. All of our feelings are entwined with the whole of the biome and its technological prostheses (including writing) in countless ways:

lest we forget
the screen of your phone

turned green from the night
you cried into its face, as though

the very pixels could impute
a body’s affects our to-and-fro

traipse from cyborg to goddess

and which were the hands of the woman

who built it? the ghost-handed
mother who says there and there

The sequence ends:

my love for you will last until the sick lake

evaporates

is a thing there’ll be no body

to speak to. else failing,

lay me down in a polytunnel

so the sky can make its own shallow sense.

let’s set up camp around the lake

as we archive the whir of slowing organelles

watching the old-fashioned sun

as it sets on the field of our many tired eyes.

This last short poem shares with Paul Muldoon, and with John Donne, an attempt to ingeniously yoke its objects together. The images are ones of connections that are not connections. The lake and love, bodies of water and bodies, a polytunnel and a sky that it separates the speaker from. They exist in a world that is natural and discursive at the same time.

By dint of being both discursive and natural, this world is one in which descriptions can contain values. We love the way we do, this poem seems to suggest, because we pollute lakes. This has a feminist critical bite, playing on the long discursive entaglement of women and nature, but it is also describes nature in order to show why certain experiences matter. Looked at rightly, the poem suggests, many things reveal to us something of the value-bearing structure of the world. In this sense, our experiences matter because they are always ‘political’ always ethical, there’s no other way of their being personal, and even the sight of a lake is just so. It has to matter. Matter is what the world is made of.

But what is it about this particular part of the world, this particular lake that touches us? Personally, I see, not feel, how the Tatou lake functions in the sequence. I’m not sure if it does much more than illustrate the philosophical claims. The deadening allusion to Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is just one example of the poem putting its thumb on the scales. Everything is connected, but sort of telegraphically. Things aren’t brought to life, they are pointed at and described as already alive. Lafarge seems to me to be pulling the same trick as Muldoon, but it is as if she has fallen for it herself. The things she thinks of are often resonant examples of ecofeminist theory, one after another. There are strangenesses and successes in these poems, but too many of them serve the same bland truth. I can’t help but find that a little wasteful.

Lafarge shows one path forward for the poet—you don’t have to justify why your experiences matter—to ask that question is to misunderstand how the world really is. A poem can demonstrate, precisely through its symbolism, that the world is always touching us with truths. Even though getting there takes quite painstaking and rigorous academic work, I think this is too easy, a waving away of problems, pointing in the direction of the relevant authorities. Still, in UK mainstream poetry, the gesture has been generative.

5.

Take another example. Late in Rachael Allen’s second collection, God Complex, a long poem in rangy prose and verse sections, the speaker, grieving a failed relationship, condoles with some hormone-riddled fish:

The fish take my drugs through the water, so I am closer to them, and their bodies begin to morph to look like mine. I giggle at them through the water with their hairy heads, we are synced!, I type.

In miniature, here, you can see some of the pleasures and complexities of the sequence. The fish are anthropomorphic both literally, and metaphorically. They serve on the one hand, as actual example of the ways humans alter the environment, and on the other hand, as a way we fail to see the ‘natural world’. Fish really do absorb our hormonal pollutants, but they don’t grow hair, and the poet’s nervous amusement and disturbed identification, her joke about cycles, is, I think, meant to be taken as parody of what poets do all the time, make images of their feelings from the world outside them.

God Complex attempts to bring these two levels of human/nature interaction together—to situate our image-making within actual ecology. As you might gather from the fish, it also points to the way in which female pain performs that connective work, as a force long associated with the natural, and at the same time with the false, the exaggerated, the overwrought. The world, Allen suggests, is poisoning women in much the same way as it poisons fish. They really are synced.

The collection offers a narrative of mourning, in which the painful failure of a ‘toxic’ relationship does and does not provide a way of thinking about the degradation of our ecosystem. The book is, as its title suggests, an extremely ambitious work. Metaphors, the microbiome, mortgages, all are connected, and made to bear the weight of the speaker’s heartbreak.

Most obviously, the place where the connecting work is done is at home, that toxic place. Moulds proliferate, as do man-made carcinogens, such as ‘the dilapidated artex’, that the speaker remembers ‘praying towards’. Man-made cruelties proliferate too, ‘like mould’, miseries handed down in ways that remind the speaker of class, gender and the gulf these make between the ‘incompatible lovers’.

A lot hangs on whether you buy the literal connection between kinds of toxicity. The speaker’s emotions are part of a body, we are often told. They too are products of the degraded environment, bad hormones, microplastics, leaching runoff. But sometimes this ecology of mood feels like programmatic ‘posthumanism’; the variousness of the world can come across as slightly pre-digested.

And yet, even if you prefer poetry to ecopoetics, local pleasures give the work an undeniable power. There aren’t many poets with a gift for phrasemaking on the scale of Allen’s. Who else could bring their work close to both the Sylvia Plath of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ and the JH Prynne of High Pink on Chrome without absurd contortion? I was struck by dozens of little moments of language folding all of Allen’s cares and concerns into each other, catchily. Some examples: ‘Time warps like a weak tree’; ‘the sun banks on a kidney-shaped lake—orange spread on water with the pine smell swinging.’, ‘a caterpillar’s gnostic face in the frost.’, ‘You rode me like an unusual skull sleigh...’ At her best, Allen writes enduring lines, lines that hold together all of her concerns without making an argument that they fit: ‘There is blood in my carcinogens, like alphabet soup’.

6.

For Seán Hewitt, in Rapture’s Road, likewise his second collection, what connects our imaginative transactions with the natural world to nature itself, what binds us within it, is desire. The book’s spine is a visionary sequence which mostly takes place in a dreamlike cruising ground. In this park, the poet pursues a boy who may be self-knowledge or beauty itself. The central conceit, which like Allen, makes a kind of ecological argument—this time by rendering all kinds of desire a route (or road) into nature—is a charming one. At its strongest, the collection approaches the kind of queer pastoral you can find in Shakespeare’s comedies, or the underrated Clive Barker film Nightbreed, where desire is so full of intoxicating promise as to be overpowering and threatening to all sense of self.

The best poems use Hewitt’s rare command of the traditional skills of poetry against itself. In my favourite of the poems in here, for example, ‘Whoso List to Hunt’, nature seems to brim with a kind of sexual aggression that the poet wants to make into images and which he is then distanced from into the poise of the poem. The gap between longing and what words can do yawns suggestively.

But the trouble is that Hewitt doesn’t really want to lose control. Or rather, it never feels wild when he does. Instead, he shows off what looks like ‘mastery of form’, but which seems to be a kind of hostility to unevenness. Everything must be sonorous and gorgeous. But the effect is not, say, baroque. It’s flattening. Take this description from the first poem, ‘A Ministry’:

                      Like the inside

of a mussel shell – the way the night sky

sheens humid and bone hard

and lucent.

Everything after night sky is like an over explanation (show me a non-lucent sheen) of a joke trying to disguise itself as more joke. Wasteful verbings like ‘sheens’ don’t add anything, rather they make you suspect that the author doesn’t trust their material.

As a result of this mistrust, every object glimpsed in the book serves to elicit the same portentous amazement from Hewitt. The effect is apparent in his heavy use of the metaphorical construction the [adjective] [vehicle] of [tenor]. Not all of them are bad, ‘the blown prostate of a chestnut shell’ is pretty good, but they accumulate: ‘the white hot cinder of your crest’; ‘the brute angel of your decarceration’; ‘the folded, luxurious parachute of her innards’ (of a gutted pig); ‘the dark womb of the sky’. In ‘Dogs’, two men ‘ride’ a ‘silicon piston’ with ‘the slick glove of their own forms’. By the time I got to the by itself unobjectionable ‘the soundproofed room of heaven’, I was banging my head against the padding.

You could argue that this interchangeable extravagance is itself an effective way of showing the overwhelming power of desire, its transformative force, its Ovidian excess. But it doesn’t feel like that. Nothing is excessive for its own sake; everything is present in just the right amount to hit you over the head with the fact you’re reading a capital P poem. That seems to be in tension with the ecstatic union with nature that Hewitt is after. It’s not that writing needs to feel ‘natural’ to be eco-friendly, but it’s hard to be moved looking at an endless shining field of identical solar panels.

7.

In the work of Lafarge, Allen, and Hewitt, then, the ecological offers a way to really find one’s own experience meaningful; it is an attempt to make one’s personal feelings socially responsible. They might not themselves provide privileged insight into what we ought to do, but they show us how we are tied to the world. We do not project our feelings onto the world, we are projections of it, matter in the same way as everything else. Our experiences are in this sense, cosmically significant.

And yet, in many cases of this kind of poem, what I am left with is the sense in which the experiences do not actually rise to this level of significance. They are too easily redeemed, rescued, by being entangled in a whole ecological network. Everything is political, everything is connected, everything matters. But what specific things might matter more or less? How can we see the stoniness of the stone? This kind of judgement seems to me to be one that poets ought to help us with—in the best phrasings, moments, and articulations of these collections we glimpse this; the poems compel assent, but there is too much work being done outside the poem, which makes the struggles somehow seem small. In current mainstream poetry, I rarely get the sense that any particular moment or experience matters, only that it all does. If you squint, it’s not that different from saying none of it does. It’s just a more complicated way of saying it.

---

^[1] When I speak of this weakening of historical sense, I mean not exactly that we do not feel connected to the past, that we do not feel it in our bones, as TS Eliot would have it. Rather, poets who think of what they do as a kind of practice in history, as an activity that has changed and which plays a role in social change—are obliged to reckon with something like a model of ‘combined and uneven development’, a totality without a single linear direction. Where once it seemed to many writers that there was a clear task of the avant-garde: to drive poetic history forward, now it appears that many kinds of poetics are legitimate interventions in social practice. As with the actual model of combined and uneven development, reckoning with this complexity has been spurred mostly because of the need to think about colonialism and its attendant racial ideologies. In a later essay, I want to consider this topic in detail, especially in relation to Sandeep Parmar’s extremely important essay Not a British Subject.

^[2] There are still places where one sees strong principles grounding a poetics. Most productively in the previous decade, I think, in some black poets in the USA, and also in UK figures such as DS Marriott who were explicitly theorising a poetics of ‘blackness’. Here, there is a ‘necessary’ way to write, given what these writers take to be the historical condition of blackness. There were also tensions within this work, as in all avant-gardes and all traditions, and indeed at moments the work falls prey to the same kinds of problems I want to discuss in the series, but it is a subject too big to take on here.