We Could Send Letters

What came through my letterbox yesterday? A selection of leaflets advertising carry-out pizzas and other foods, two envelopes containing junk mail, a package with a book inside sent by a publisher for possible review in Magma, and a business letter. I can't remember the last time someone actually wrote a letter to me that wasn't to do with work or was carrying out some form of transaction. I can't remember when I last wrote such a letter either.

A few months ago, I wrote a fairly long article on a book published by Bloodaxe, Airmail: the Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer, an article which was commissioned and published by The Dark Horse magazine, issue 31 (which I would thoroughly recommend, whether my article interests you or not). The letters were written between 1964 and 1990 and they make for fascinating reading. They cover historical upheavals from the Vietnam War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, matters of religion and spirituality, the art of writing, translation, the pretensions and strengths of literary ‘scenes’, and they chart the growth of a close friendship. The two poets translate one another’s work and arrange reading tours. They are also peppered with sharp humour and quotable asides. It’s a brilliant book.

What strikes me about it though, something I didn’t mention in my article, is that such a book will be impossible in years to come. We don’t write letters any more. Of course, people still communicate through email and social networks, but it’s not the same. Anyone trying to chart connections between poets in decades to come by analysing Facebook activity will have a soul-destroying task. FB’s archive system is hopeless and I’m told the walls of the dead are often torn down, which will no doubt come as a relief to most people in that position.

Email isn’t really any better. It’s great for communicating events, meetings, transactions and for organising things quickly. It’s great for business and for any activity that thrives on getting things done fast. Theoretically, an email has as much scope for interesting exchanges as a letter. You write, the recipient writes back. But in practice, the dynamic is very different. I was once told that I ought to reply to emails within two days at the most and that any delay was bad form. This was in connection with work-related email but the sheer speed and immediacy of email communication creates demands and expectations that extend beyond the world of work.

If I was to try to write ‘a letter in an email’ full of news, thoughts, ideas etc, the sort of thing people used to set down into six pages of handwritten A5 paper and pack into an envelope, I am doing two things. I am writing in expectation of a reply. I also sense an awkwardness of imposing that on the recipient. I wouldn't want to make anyone feel that they must reply with speed but at the same time, if a reply doesn’t come within a few days, I’d be wondering what had happened. I’d know too that an email correspondence like that is almost impossible to maintain. It’s too fast, too much of an imposition. An old-fashioned letter to a penfriend, sent second-class or airmail, took days or even weeks to arrive. There was no sense of expecting an immediate reply by return post. You could post several letters in a week or none for a month. You could send off a quick paragraph or a 12-page tome. To keep the correspondence going did entail a degree of commitment, of course, but it was possible, a relatively laid-back activity. I think email is kidding us on that such things are still possible but it is a medium hostile to the kind of exchange Bly and Transtromer maintained over four decades. Can you imagine a book in twenty years time being published with the title, 'Email: the Communications of X and Y' (insert names of interesting poets), a selection of electronic transmissions between them over the last 40 years? I can't...

I was listening to Aztec Camera's classic Postcard single b-side, 'We Could Send Letters' on YouTube and noticed that someone had commented along the lines of "If Roddy wrote this now,would it be 'We Could Send Text Messages'?" The comment is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but it made me think all the same. The reality is that such a song is unimaginable today. Texts, emails etc may keep people in touch but they are not letters. I'm not meaning to be hopelessly romantic or nostalgic about this, but I do think we have lost something vital with the demise of postal correspondence and I don’t think current forms of communication are anywhere near replacing that gap. While it’s unlikely that anyone will want to publish correspondence between most writers (no bad thing, I guess!), the ferment of ideas, inspiration and practical activity generated by the Transtromer/Bly letters is enough to convince me that we are missing something important.

Facebook, Blogging and Narcissism

I got into an interesting Facebook discussion yesterday on narcissism; whether or not poetry blogging was simply a narcissistic activity which stole time away from what was truly important – writing poems.

Well, the irony that this discussion took place on Facebook is not lost on me. Facebook is surely the most potentially narcissistic activity ever invented. Just as football matches may indeed help young males to scream away their latent aggression, Facebook can end up as an unbelievably massive pit of pent-up hubris. Do you need to say something about yourself, your opinions, products, beliefs or attitudes? Now you can throw it all up in public and no one will hand you a mop and bucket afterwards. In Facebook, self-reference is not only expected, it’s the entire raison d’etre – if you bypass those who use it only to hook up with old friends or get a date for Saturday night.

Facebook is a giant blog. Or rather, it’s a zillion different blogs all rabbitting on at one another endlessly. But even a poet’s most considered Facebook wall (is there such a thing?) or ‘Timeline’ will invariably lack the breadth and depth of the better poetry blogs, and will be a hundred times more narcissistic than most. If you went through this blog from beginning to end, you would find some entries I’d probably want to disown and one day I may delete everything I’d rather not leave future generations to snigger over, on the off chance anyone from a future generation actually stumbled in here – probably drunk and frittering away a research grant they got to study barbarian communication methods. But I wouldn’t delete everything.

Basically, saying that blogs are hubristic is like saying books are manifestations of mad egos or that songs are sung only by people who love the sound of their own voice. Anyone who publishes anything anywhere in any medium is saying, “I think this will interest other people.” The bad news is that most of it won’t. Some of it will for a few minutes, but almost nothing will last. Value resides in a tiny spoonful of this glutinous soup.

The argument runs that at least a book or album has been selected and worked on by publisher, editor, agent, producer etc, whereas blogs are mainly inane, self-driven ramblings of people who could have spent their time more productively. But most books are rubbish, most albums too, even despite this level of control and input. “Inane, self-driven ramblings” could describe many poems published today and I’m not talking about ‘confessional’ poems or any other kind of autobiographical verse (some of which is good), but poems which seem designed to offer the reader the promise of wisdom, insight, epiphany or joy and instead present him/her with an earnest exercise in cliché, or just scream, “Look how original I am! Look how fun I am! Look how clever I am! Look at this unique image/phrase/technique I created (and don’t realise has been used before by about five million other poets before me because I don’t read poetry so as to avoid being influenced by it)! But please save your applause until the end of my ninety-seven pages...” In other words, a blog is not necessarily any more self serving than a poem, even a poem that has been accepted by a magazine.

I suppose I could have written a poem in the time it’s taken me to slam down this article. But I see no reason to bring yet another poem into the world to join the millions of other poems no one wants to read just for the sake of it. I write a poem when it feels necessary to do so and I work hard on getting it just right. Every semi-colon of it. I write a blog post if I feel in the mood and people can take it or leave it. Leave it? Sure thing. Be my guest. Or don’t be. Facebook, after all, is waiting for your attention...

Facebook, Poets and Writers

Facebook is fun. There’s no doubt about that and the number of users testifies to it. You’ll never get millions of people to sign up voluntarily for something that takes up time and bores the pants of everyone. For writers, it’s also an effective way of putting people in touch with one another, of making new links and cementing old ones, of keeping up with what’s going on in the literary world via a multitude of links, videos and status updates.

But there are problems. Serious problems. Everyone bangs on about privacy issues, sometimes with good reason and sometimes as knee-jerk reaction. The amount of time it can swallow is colossal, even if you think you’re on top of things; it’s hard to stay out of a debate you’ve contributed to for long, and good newspaper headlines make effective links you just can’t help clicking on. Some people talk about being addicted, but it’s often less of an addiction and more a feeling that you need to know what people are saying about what you’ve said, so that you can respond.

And so much of what’s on Facebook is interesting! Within fifteen minutes your head can be swimming with David Cameron’s latest idiotic soundbite, an atrocity in Uganda, a murder in Essex, the latest Guardian blog on why literary prizes mean everything/nothing, the discovery of ancient lakes on Mars, a new chocolate bar, glowing reviews of the latest Faber effort in all the broadsheets, an old Pavement video, an interesting fact about a little-known marsupial, A.N. Other’s latest poem about eating breakfast cereal while looking out a window at clouds...

And this is the real problem, I think. To write poetry requires focus, not a narrow focus, but focus that leaves space for the unexpected intruder. Intrusion has to come from a deeper place than fifteen minutes worth of noisy and tangled links, videos and discussions. A poem often begins to work when it is focused and then shoots off at a tangent, a tangent that somehow feels inevitable by the end of the poem. Social networking gets in the way both of the focus and of the welcome intruder. Instead there’s a crowd jostling at the walls of your brain for entry and, really, almost none of that stuff should have an invitation. The one intruder who matters usually gets lost in the baying crowd.

In the latest Magma, issue 51, Maitreyabandhu writes:

For a poem to communicate profound thought, the poet needs to think deeply; for a poem to express deep emotion, the poet needs to feel deeply; for a poem to be beautiful the poet needs to experience beauty.

Social networking can be detrimental to depth of thinking and I’m beginning to think that it can also act to limit our emotional depth too. I suppose it’s the same with any form of information overload: we may feel many things in quick succession about a huge variety of events and facts, but we’re denied the chance to go deeper into how we feel about anything. We might discuss things and learn things and discuss how we feel about things, but it’s all instant, buzzing communication, and usually has nothing to do with the specific piece of writing we’re trying to get done. Expressing how we feel in poetry without resorting to cliché, obscurity (always good for hiding the fact that we’re not saying anything! Although I am not suggesting that all obscurity implies this...) and overblown sentiment is one of the most difficult things to carry off in a poem, and social networks have made it that bit more difficult.

I’m not sure what the answer is. One solution is to abandon all social networks, and some writers I know have gone that way, but they do, I think, have value. Another solution is radically to limit time spent using them, but this is notoriously difficult to achieve and it only takes a few minutes for your head to be clogged with every subject under the sun. Emptying it of all that stuff can take hours. Maybe going for a run or taking up squash could help. Anyway, I’ll now post this article and, of course, link it to my Facebook wall...