Pure doggerel

Published 06 December 2004

Poetry - The prize-winning writer Don Paterson recently despaired of the amateurs in his profession. Andy Croft despairs of him

Poetry should be reclaimed as "a dark art", urged Don Paterson in his T S Eliot lecture at the Royal Festival Hall just over a month ago. Poetic technique, he declared, is the poet's "arcana", something that must be kept secret from the reader. Only by joining together in a kind of medieval "guild" could professional poets "restore our sense of power". Cue scary laughter.

It was splendidly dotty stuff, part Gilderoy Lockhart, part Draco Malfoy, well timed for the DVD release of the new Harry Potter. But if poets are to belong to a "guild", a kind of elite, secret society of magicians - something like Slytherin, perhaps - who are the Muggles?

Paterson was quite clear about this, suggesting the eradication of amateur poets, whom he accused of "infantilis- ing our art". Worse, armed only with "a beermat, a pencil and a recently mildly traumatic experience", they bombard Paterson, who is poetry editor at Picador, with their "handwritten drivel".

But you have to be unpublished before you can be published. It may be hard to imagine, but even Paterson was once an unpublished poet. Not many poets make a living solely by selling books. Paterson (who has received three Scottish Arts Council grants and won several prizes with cash rewards, including the Whitbread) certainly doesn't. Before he became a "professional" poet, he was a professional musician. He still is. In fact, he is also a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Not much time for writing poetry there.

Anyway, what is an "amateur" poet? For most of human history, poetry was largely anonymous, unwritten, public and shared. Only with the recent emergence of mass-literate societies in the west has poetry become identified with the private expression of individual feeling in books by "professionals".

Does Paterson mean he wants to eradicate unpublished poets? Or just those who have ambitions to be published? Those who are not published by a Lon-don publisher? Or those who are not published by Picador? How many poetry prizes do you have to win before you become a "professional" poet? Or is there a hereditary principle involved?

Paterson's idea of the "profession" of poetry appears to derive from a class- specific version of the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts. According to him, "only plumbers can plumb, roofers roof and drummers drum; only poets can write poetry". Has Paterson never changed a tap, or tapped a drum? Poets are not genetically different from plumbers. Most roofers would be better at writing poetry than poets are at replacing missing roof tiles. Paterson seems to be invoking the old Soviet model in which you had to be a member of the Writers' Union before you could be published.

It is not as if there are only so many as-yet-unwritten poems to go round. Moreover, "amateur" poets in schools, colleges, prisons, libraries, bookshops and poetry readings constitute the bulk of the audience for the "professionals". Do professional musicians feel threatened by people who sing in the bath? Do professional footballers burn with resentment at those who play in Sunday leagues? Do professional chefs object to the thought that most people cook their own meals? Presumably Paterson's students at St Andrews are "amateurs". Has he told them yet that they require eradicating?

Paterson's comments on Harold Pinter are especially instructive. Referring to Pinter's anti-war poetry, he said that "anyone can do that". Indeed, a great many poets - "professional" and "amateur" - have written powerfully against the invasion of Iraq (although few have employed iambic pentameter to such passionate effect as Pinter did in his collection War). That "anyone" can write about such a necessary subject is precisely the enduring appeal and significance of poetry.

Sadly, hostility to the idea of the amateur is a familiar feature of the contemporary poetry scene. The sound of "professional" poets pulling the ladders up behind them is part of the background noise. The Poetry Society may spend its time declaring that poetry belongs to everyone, sponsoring initiatives such as National Poetry Day, Poetry Class and Poetry News, but it also publishes the forbidding and mysterious Poetry Review, a magazine apparently designed to put any casual reader off poetry for good.

The most consistent advocate of this kind of flaky elitism was T S Eliot, the Lord Voldemort of the aristocratic principle in poetry. Fittingly, Paterson (the only poet to win the T S Eliot Prize twice) made his remarks in a lecture named after a man who believed in the divine right of kings and argued that the Education Act of 1944 would encourage cultural "barbarism".

But this is a small crack on a wider fault-line in British literary culture - and in British society. Paterson was tapping into a peculiarly English use of the word "amateur" as a term of abuse. Like "provincial", "humorous" and "earnest", it involves a horrified rejection of the aspirational rhetoric of new Labour Britain. And it smells uncommonly like old-fashioned snobbery and misanthropy.

As Harry Potter's Hagrid says, "when a wizard goes over ter the Dark Side, there's nothin' and no one that matters to 'em any more". Scary.

Andy Croft has published seven books of poetry. His most recent is Comrade Laughter (Flambard)

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5 comments from readers

digerium
18 October 2007 at 10:48

Don is just a malevolent old crone

Isn't he?

Good poetry

Elitist poet

Relishes himself

In the dark

Under his bed

Master bating

Desmond Swords
17 March 2008 at 01:00

And he "fucking hates blogs" according to a young proselytizing poet running an under thirties e-rag, and by the sounds of it, sounds nasty in print, and george sziertes delivered a well aimed perfect riposte in one of his blog-spots, in which his satire was so spot on, it is from the lips of s/he herself, the goddess poetry spoke clear through this hungarian mouth ó bhéal - moth stream - music of what happens according to the bardic lore of Finn McCool and Cúchulainn in the heroic age of these islands, prior ot the roman colonisation process of what became england, which imploded into a dark age of angle and saxon forcing the native brythonic culture to live on only in wales, scotland left alone, indistinquishible from Ireland after Dakl Riada and the fusing of the two, who spoke the same accent and wrote in the same langugae, so much so their poets where indistinguishable, and most scottish poets today have opted into the state UK Sir Donnie patted like a dog, he hates farkin bloogs, nea a ladsie but a wuff and his mugshot says it all, look into my eye/s, i am going to hypnotise you by a hieretic act of priestly mumbo jumbo, eff and blind, be a s/haggis who went his own way during the dark ages, when england was a place of continual war, more or less, vikings, angles, saxons and then just as it got ordered, the normans came and since them, no more. Indeed the english mish mash power symbol and practice of divine kings spread into the thinking, as one expects, over a thousand years, into a cultural whatever so deep and difficult to speak of, there is no discussion on this matter, and don hates as a gatekeeper, coz he is in a gang, and yet must still see himself as excluded, so obviously is not happy there are others "better" than him, in the way he sees it, people who will wind him up with their effotlessness, who do you think it could be? Well whoever don is jealous of, s/he is smarter and it looks like the scoot aint arsed about the bardic lore, just the tin and brass, and still moaning.

Poetry is 50/50 satire and praise in the bardic lore, and don got off on the wrong foot. He was good, won prizes, got feted as the next big deal, and fairly quickly fell into positions of editorial power and wears his heart on his sleeve and is unable to fulfill the pre-requisite lore of staying mentally healthy in the "abundance of goading" Amergin articulates in the touch stone bardic text don may not have read, or dismissed, favouring solely graeco-roman myth, and thus his black outpourings, moaning git..

Desmond Swords
17 March 2008 at 01:02

george, sziertes,

forgive me don for i have sinned

unfeelingly thought of becoming

s/he herself in my mind, the love

peace grá agus síocháin, verse.

Desmond Swords
17 March 2008 at 01:15

ó bhéal - mouth stream.

And i would direct the reader and dreamer finkin thaze can be a poet, to go the the link below and get acquainted with paul casey, pc, who is a major force and injection for good into poetry, specifically and meticulously over the last 15 years, acquired 95% of irish myth, totally memorised and can retrieve the info from memory, and only now is his poetic attainment beginning, the mystic poetic totally natural way a society has at throwing up new cultural regulators in poetry, a new generation of the same breed, humanity whooshing in and the voices like don, naturally unhappy as taste and reputation makers losing their power in the corrupting democracy of the net, as Katy Evans Bush puts it, as now anyone from a achav in buckingham palace to an underprivileged child of eastern european immigrants seeking a better life, a pole or lithuanian, romanian, our gang, Europe, all of us, anyone who can master english and speak their dreams coherently, don fears, a bully boy and blady wiv a size complex..a plassie whose myth is mine, perhaps, whose arsed, if people wanna wriote, let them and leave them alone, even if they are...horrror, lacking in any real talent, as it is the process, the just doing it that will ever improve a person, and i have been proved wrong enough to know, that someone who we think has no talent, if they keep at it, most will eventually surprise us, if it is in them, and if not, so what, as long as it keeps them happy, we should be poplite and not point out how rubbish they are, unless you are don, an embittered editor whose own work aint exactly mystical rocket science of great political change, but good stuff and there are lots of poets around like this, who are very good in the sense they have a lot of natural ability, but they do not exercise it to its full power, coz if they were, they wouldn't be moaning, coz they'd be being the best they can be, which is the best one can hope for, to fulfill our own potential, as a human act of culture, not as some fodder for a boot boy skiving at HQ and bullying others, calling them crap to make huimself feel good, but hiding the fact he is unhappy with himself as apoet, obviously because he feels a fraud aperhaps, i dunno, imitate shamelessley until the plastic wears off and out own will and history plot an ouvre of praise poetry and satirical prose in which we defebd ourself from the many clever haters, like don, who wouldn't publish me i bet, even though i am not shit..

Desmond Swords
17 March 2008 at 01:15