Poetry Sales and The Point

There are moments in a poet’s life - few and usually far between - that begin to take on a surreal quality, when a poem you wrote seems to grow legs independently of you and gallops off into the distance. That must be true for writers like Jenny Joseph and Sheenagh Pugh when poems they wrote became incredibly famous and popular – not necessarily their best poems, but poems that struck a chord not with traditional poetry readers but with the general public. It must be a weird feeling, especially when people don’t flock to buy everything else you’ve written – all the better stuff you’ve written! – the way they might do with a novelist. It seems that poems come as individuals.

I had a very minor taste of this over the weekend when a poem I wrote, a pantoum called ‘The Point’, was featured in the Guardian newspaper as its Saturday Poem. It’s a political satire, and isn’t ever going to have the same level of appeal as a poem about growing old and wearing purple, but (at the time of writing) it has been shared on Facebook 115 times (most of them not FB friends of mine) and retweeted 16 times. Not a lot really. I’m sure an article on Jessie J would get that many shares inside a few seconds but I am also sure that ‘The Point’ has now been read by more people than any poem I have ever written. It shows the power of The Guardian and the Saturday Poem brand. Just think how popular poetry could be and would be seen to be, if more high profile newspapers and media (TV, film, Amazon etc) published or presented poems in ways designed to extend their readership. The audience would grow rapidly, I'm sure of that.

Has the publication of ‘The Point’ sold a single copy of The Good News, the collection it comes from? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it hadn’t. People will read a single poem in a newspaper or newspaper website quite happily and may even really enjoy it, but only few people, most of them seasoned poetry readers, will read a poetry collection for fun. That’s not a problem unless you’re a poetry publisher trying to make a living or, indeed, unless you’re a poet who believes that collections are a good thing. I am one of these and would prefer a world in which more people read Dante than Dan Brown. That said, I did note that Clare Pollard’s ‘Ovid’s Heroines’ was the number 10 best seller last week at the Guardian bookshop (presumably the result of a favourable review in the Guardian not long before) in a list dominated by novels and popular non-fiction. It was good to see a poetry collection in there, a little chink of hope.

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...