ESSAY: What is a bad poem exactly? (Part 2)

Further thoughts on taste and the role of criticism in forming it.

My previous post on the subject of bad poetry prompted some thoughtful responses, and I felt my own responses to these were worth gathering in a follow-up essay. So I drafted one – back at the end of March, in fact, on a train to Southampton. Since then I’ve only had time to think on it in short gasps, but that process has, oddly enough, resulted in a much more complete thesis than I’d originally envisaged — more cheery too, if you’ll bear with me till the end.

I said previously that bad poems need to be invented, and to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the poetry critic to have a function. But there’s another, simpler reason why bad poetry must be willed into existence. Suppose for a moment that every published poem — or the vast majority of them — were unquestionably skilfully written, greatly rewarding reader attention. There would still be far, far too many of them for any one person to attend to. We would need to come up with a way of deciding which poems to spend our limited time investigating.

That need, really, is the root of literary taste. Whatever system or standard we put into place, it operates as a means of dismissing from our mind much that exists — or, at least, sending it to the very periphery of conscience — so that we can focus on a more manageable portion. And since it’s easier to dismiss something if we come up with reasons to regard it as ‘bad’, or nurture an ingrained distaste for it, this is what we do.

(Another hypothetical: suppose the only poetry that survives the end of civilisation is some small amount of the ‘bad’ stuff. Can we imagine, for a moment, that future alien anthropologists would have any means of recognising that it lacks something vital? It’s difficult to realistically conceive of any kind of metric for poetic quality that would extend beyond our shared experiential context — other than, perhaps, symmetry, which can be found everywhere.)

I should add that literary taste also exists, like many things, for the purpose of forming social bonds. To put it crudely: convincing yourself you find a certain kind of poem to be very fine and another sort very drab is sometimes a precondition of being accepted within certain social circles. I will address this as I go on — partly because I think it bears repeating that most of those who claim to be solely interested in ‘the quality of the poem itself’ are not being honest with themselves.

But I’m mostly concerned with the core function of taste and the role criticism has to play in it. We need taste to direct us to the poems that are of most use in enriching and improving our lives. If we do not cultivate taste of some kind, then we don’t know where to start or how to sort through the mass of poetry available, and so can hardly benefit from the artform at all — which is, in fact, the position of those millions who never read or think about it.

Let’s consider three ways in which taste is formed:

1. The Sniff Test … and its Limitations

I’ve often seen it suggested – and not just in response to the previous essay – that when it comes to it, judging poetry is simply a question of waiting to see if it knock your socks off. Emily Dickinson is responsible for the go-to quote: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

In other words: does it pass the sniff test? Do you vibe with it? Does it grab your attention? The appeal of such a test, obviously, is that it removes the need for critical evaluation and gives primacy to our most spontaneous feelings. It’s an especially useful philosophy for anyone made uncomfortable by the prospect of having to defend or rethink their choices, or who worries that if they try to make a judgement using their intellect, they will ‘get it wrong’.

Often (though not always) this approach is paired with a belief that poetry is burdened by the critical and academic culture around it. Teachers and critics, it is proposed, have rendered the artform unappealing to the masses by overcomplicating how we relate to it, and if they’d just butt out, readers might have a chance to find their way back.

The poetry critic still has a role to play here, but is reduced to a kind of race tipster. This is more-or-less how some of my friends explain their relationship to criticism, ie. they seek out one or more critics whose tastes are reliably similar to theirs, and follow those critics’ recommendations. Disagreement is accepted as just one of those things — I like what I like and you like what you like, and there’s an end to it.

This has the merit of being clean, simple and stress-free. But there are drawbacks, and flaws in some of the underlying assumptions.

First of all, while critical and analytical language is sometimes off-puttingly opaque or blustery, it’s hard to believe poetry would fare better without any effort to inculcate appreciation of its finer mechanisms. Other artforms are much more suited to arousing spontaneous feelings (either because they contain significant elements that skip the fiddly language-processing parts of our brains, or, in the case of prose stories, because they engender sympathy for people in peril). Most poetry requires some degree of serious attention by readers who know what to look (or listen) for, and if you like a poem, it’s very probably because you have, at some point, been instilled with a method for appreciating it.

If you don’t know where that method comes from, how do you know it can’t be improved upon? How do you know you aren’t capable of recognising much more that delights and astounds you?

Secondly, the sniff test leaves little room for the possibility of growing to like a poem, or for any conversation about how that might happen. It envisages no route by which those who disagree might come to understand one another’s point of view.

It also assumes there to be little to no value in sitting with negative feelings. If a poem, rather than knocking our socks off, makes us feel vulnerable, sad, angry or foolish — if it threatens our worldview with new insights or suggestions, or imaginative alternatives to what we consider ordinary and sensible — then it is in danger of being dismissed immediately. But can’t such experiences sometimes be useful, even powerfully enlightening, when we give ourselves time to digest them?

Thirdly, if we want to share our enjoyment of a poem, or if we believe it has something valuable to offer, since critical evaluation has gone out the window we instead have to rely on emotional contagion — our in-built propensity to influence each others’ feelings by passing on a kind of energy. That is to say, we rave. We behave as if our socks, or the top of our head, have come off, in order to get others to join the party. Consensus-forming inevitably becomes driven by various kinds of charisma and intensity.

That then leads to rifts opening up between one group and another — those who ‘get it’ versus those who don’t — and because each group only understands the poetry they admire in terms of the feelings it arouses (feelings which are rooted in the social context which gave rise to them) they are poorly prepared to mend those rifts. So much for stress-free.

Finally, on a more personal level, whenever I’ve genuinely encountered off-top-head moments, the sensation doesn’t last. I come back down to earth and the poem soon starts to look more ordinary. I’ve found that these momentary flashes of feeling are a poor indication of the overall effect of a poem on my life or learning, such that if I allowed myself to be led by my nose instead of scrutinising more closely, I think I would admire very little poetry at all. I suppose I think of having the top of my head come off as something akin to being impressed by a great magic trick.

For all these reasons, there need to be additional processes at work in taste-forming. The poetry critic must have a bigger role to play.

Let’s move on to …

2. The Shared Narrative … and its Limitations.

It’s widely agreed that taste should be improved upon. Capitalism demands it, since people spend more money when they seek to sophisticate themselves. Cultural cohesion demands it, since continuity of belief and sensibility requires a degree of intergenerational harmony – children coming to value and respect a proportion of what their parents did. And survival logic demands it, since learning ever more about our surroundings, about the depths of our own and others’ minds, betters our ability to breast chaos and madness. The ignorant and incurious, we know, end up baffled to the point of rage by what they perceive only at surface level. To stubbornly hold on to those models of the world we form early in our lives invites an increasing sense of alienation – the feeling that a flood of indecipherable otherness is rising to unseat us.

Art is not, therefore, an end in itself, but a practical measure. Making and studying it is both research and communion — it puts us more in touch with how others understand things, and spurs us towards an ever more complete, more finely calibrated view of how things really are.

Consider: we know a certain style of poem can sell hundreds of thousands of books and make its author famous. We’ve seen it happen. If what poets and poetry critics want most is for poetry to be popular, to dazzle a larger audience, shouldn’t they all celebrate and imitate this style? Why do so many insist that the poetry in question is bad poetry? I would say it’s because they think it has nothing to teach them. They suspect, in fact, that the very reason for its success is that it asks nothing of its readers in terms of advancing their range of empathy or awareness or their grasp of reality, instead repeating back to them what they already think and feel.

Whether or not you think this is a fair or correct judgement, it demonstrates an inherent sense that poetry exists not just to be liked, but to ‘make your soul grow’ (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut). Against that background, poetry criticism functions as a way of persuading readers to look beyond spontaneous emotional responses and pursue something longer-lasting. “You should push past an initial lack of interest, awkwardness or sense of difficulty,” says the critic, “and trust that there are greater rewards than instantaneous stimulation. They are found in some places, and not in others. I am here to guide you to them.”

How does the critic say this convincingly? Using narrative. Using mythology. The critic positions the poet as the hero of a story. Heroes usually win, of course, so the critic employs criteria: the rules of a game at which some (but not all) poets must triumph. To read their account of a successful book is like following the commentary on a sporting event.

Often the story is of a recent or not-so-recent moment in history where the poet wins by, say, inventing something new, or saying something that needed to be said, or embodying a movement or generation, or cutting through an impasse. The biggest story of all, of course, is the canon, which imagines a nation’s poetry as a succession — almost a dynasty — of great men and women renovating and rejuvenating language itself.

This overlaps, both tidily and messily, with arts academia — which is concerned with identifying focal points for phenomenological excavation — and with education, which aims to arm students with the best possible cognitive toolbox. Maintaining a category of great-but-difficult poetry produced by a cadre of key figures serves both these purposes.

And it works — to an impressive degree, I think. Cogent criticism and commentary helps readers to develop rewarding and self-elevating styles of appreciation. It improves our collective ability to digest and synthesise all manner of ideas, and to find pleasure and/or meaning in all manner of aesthetic delivery systems.

So where does this tactic — telling the story of the poet-hero — fall down? The main problem is that people forget (rather quickly, it seems) that a story is a man-made device, a framework. They begin to treat it as gospel. Just as careful maintenance of a canon can lure the reader to new and challenging territory, so can it stop them going any further when presented as a definitive map. I’m thinking in particular of the number of times I’ve heard an ostensibly literary-minded person — a person who prides themselves on their good taste — say they don’t recognise any notable contemporary poets at all, seemingly due to the fact that critical consensus has yet to deliver them a sufficiently compelling tale of a modern conquering hero. Like languid emperors, they wait for a critical mass of authoritative nodding and cooing to be reached before they consider any writer’s oeuvre worthy of consideration.

Then, where a tale is convincingly told, there is the tendency for appreciation to be shallow and vibe-based. The poet having been painted by critics as a grand and imposing figure, some readers will contrive to be overawed by their poetry without ever properly engaging with its themes, ideas or language. I guess we could call that ‘bathing in the presence of greatness’? A nice feeling — but hardly something that grows the soul.

Similarly, there is the tendency to fixate on one narrow set of criteria, one kind of success story. Whenever a poem hits the news, internet comment sections fill up with posts bemoaning a lack of pure end-rhyme or regular meter, since this is way some commentators have learned to judge the quality (or otherwise) of a piece of work. Over-emphasis on a few pronounced features actively inhibits an ability to recognise others. Just as I’ve had students describe Dickinson as a writer of free verse simply because their sensitivity to pure rhyme hides the possibility of half-rhyme from them, readers who get too attached to well-told stories often miss the wood for the trees. This can solidify into some rather eccentric perspectives. One poet I know, who took exception to the first part of this essay, continually wages war against long-dead modernists – his lens of appreciation is romanticism, and he measures all poems by their adherence to pre-20th-century fashions.

Now, this poet would say — has said, in fact — that his lens directs him to a bounty of high-quality literary artefacts. To feed his intellect and inspire him to strive, he needs nothing else. This may be true. In a similar way, readers of those much-derided mass-selling Instapoetry books might say they have an abundant harvest – plenty to stoke mind and heart, and an online community of like-minded individuals to boot. So is there really a problem?

As per the point about survival logic, there is. The development of taste should surely engender mutual understanding, rather than fragmentation into totally irreconcilable viewpoints. It ought not to leave us all manning isolated outposts. The aforementioned poet, for all his wealth, believes that he has been cursed to live in a kind of heathen wasteland, which does not seem a very healthy place to wind up.

Further evidence of unhappy enclavism abounds: competing diatribes on who is out of touch, who sullying the artform. Bitter criticism that uses the stature of one of the critic’s favourite poet-heroes as a beating stick. A general endless grumble among readers of poetry – the very people who need to be advocating on its behalf – that the artform is in dire straits.

Stories, ultimately, don’t have room for a large main cast. That means there will always be many contradictory accounts of which poets are triumphant, via different accompanying sets of rules. And when critics get too competitive, too invested in the idea that the story they’re telling trumps all others, the effort to convince quickly slips toward feverish proclamations of genius — a mix of just the sort of windbaggery which is felt to make poetry inaccessible and just the sort of charismatic soapboxing that deepens existing divisions.

One might say that the overall problem with this approach is that it centers the critic too much. Which brings me onto ...

3. The vocational network … and its limitations

If relying solely on intuition limits growth, and listening too avidly to critics is liable to make us rigid and disillusioned, perhaps what we need is more time on the scene? Let’s consider the idea that those involved in the practice and industry of poetry — poets, editors, publishers, funders, organisers — are the ones who shape taste most reliably, continually guiding and challenging each other in rivalry and friendship. Criticism remains a vital part of this ecosystem; as well as being one strand of a generally fluid and robust exchange of views and ideas, it puts these views and ideas on the record and generates the analytical language which participants use to express themselves ever more exactly. The critic is no independent judge and rule-maker, but one who reflects and articulates a much more democratic process by which certain poets and poems come to be highly regarded.

There’s a lot about this arrangement that works — the existence of convivial relationships across different styles and schools of thought, for example, discourages open warfare, and thriving artistic communities are less vulnerable to outside manipulation than individuals going it alone. That is to say: if a poet trusts they have a place within a community and is trusted in turn, they’re better positioned to be bold and exploratory, to develop their work in a unique direction, less likely to try to conform to the harshly narrow expectations of wider society.

In fact, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the richness and variety found in contemporary published poetry is due almost entirely to the latitude afforded by scenes and communities. On top of that, close ties between poets can form a sort of treasure trail for the casual reader, leading them to expand their reading more vigorously as they bounce from poet to protégé, to partner, to publisher, and so on. Good for extending and improving on individual taste while still allowing oneself (to some extent) to be led by the nose.

But here, too, there are drawbacks. Put simply: it can get way too cosy.

Easy to imagine a small local scene that’s dominated by a few big personalities and stifled by an adherence to their way of doing things, though not too troubling, perhaps, because there can be many such scenes, and when they start to join up they’ll have to start having interesting conversations. Much more problematic is when the poetic output of an entire nation appears to be managed by a coterie.

As well as raising suspicions among readers — for example, when recipients and judges of large prizes seem to trade places annually in a choreographed dance — this gives rise to the probability of said management committee floating away from reality (and a significant proportion of their fellow artists) in a self-satisfied bubble. Criticism and discourse, instead of representing a genuine melting pot of carefully laid-out opinion, becomes heavily weighted toward chummy interviews, traded fluff and hotly-worded tributes as a vague but inflexible orthodoxy takes hold. Critical reports on the most well-regarded work forget (or aren’t able) to make a proper case for it; they just say things like “one of our finest and most distinguished poets” and “the height of his powers”.

Eventually, as always with empires small and large, power changes hands. The first part of this essay was provoked, some of you may remember, by a disgruntled reaction to centrally funded arts journals reneging on their offers to publish poems and reviews that were seen to be tainted by reactionary prejudices. That disgruntlement needs to be understood in the context of poetry’s vocational network; the real story behind it is simply that one orthodoxy has lost its grip and another has begun to take its place.

“No, no,” representatives of the old orthodoxy would say: “Our objections are principled. Judgements now are being made based on a poet’s politics, whereas we would seek to base them on the quality of the work itself.”

This, as I’ve previously indicated, is simply not true. Within the ever-shifting hurly burly of a nationwide network of artist-managers handling various pots of money and opportunities for publicity, ‘the quality of the work itself’ is unavoidably viewed through multiple prisms: politics, personality, personal and professional allegiances, publishing record, and so on. Innumerable poets on the outskirts fall foul of the resulting biases, finding their work rejected, dismissed or very coolly received, rarely with any sense as to why.

One merit of the new orthodoxy is that it is crystal clear, at least, about one way you can put yourself on editors’ black lists, and leaves itself open to challenge on this front. Close-knit arts communities with a few key figureheads rarely operate in this way — while they can serve to shelter and nurture their members, and to direct public taste in new and exciting directions, they can also easily become inscrutable and protectionist in character, gradually delegitimising any claims they have to be able to help us delineate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poetry.

4. Taste as solo expedition

Where does that leave us? I’ve argued taste is shaped by haphazard instinct, reductive storytelling, and insular networks, and I’ve come down pretty hard on the reliability of each as a process. But I don’t set out to campaign against them — even if I thought these methods could be discouraged, it’s hard to see how to throw out the bathwater without losing the baby. Something needs to govern what we choose to read.

So how can we ever know we’re on the right track? How do we know we haven’t been coaxed, conditioned or misled into giving our limited time and attention to substandard stuff, while the real treasure — the poetry which would energise us most reliably, would help the most to structure our thinking, reveal to us the most essential truths — has been hidden from view, perhaps behind a slight tweak of perspective, a crucial insight that was never delivered to us?

This, after all, is what readers of poetry accuse each other of (if a little circuitously). It is, accordingly, an anxiety that almost certainly informs the wider public’s hesitancy about diving in. Why risk wasting time on examples of an artform that might turn out to have been poorly selected — pushed to the top of the heap via nepotism, critical chicanery or shallow marketability?

I can’t answer these questions exactly. What I can do is suggest a different perspective. I’ve been careful from the start to avoid talking of ‘bad’ poetry in terms of what any individual poet has or has not achieved. That framing, so frequently deployed in criticism and commentary, is designed to position the value of a work an objective fact, centered on its author. The state of the reader is of no consequence; if the poet has achieved something of note, it is implicitly the reader’s responsibility to be appreciative. If the poet has failed to achieve something, then the reader should stay away.

But that’s not really how it works. As I’ve said, the entire notion of a poem having value is rooted in the reader’s needs: to be invigorated, enlightened and instructed, acknowledged, relieved or reassured. And exactly what kind of invigoration, enlightenment etc an individual needs very obviously varies — not just from reader to reader, but over time.

That means the best and worst poetry to read is not a fixed point. It will change depending on your personal experiences, on what you have read before, or recently, and so on. To exercise good taste is to keep moving, to continue on a journey. A ‘bad’ poem is one that, in your present circumstance, has little new to show or teach you, or instills in you an attitude or belief that ill-serves you, or disheartens you in a way that fails to bring about any redoubling of strength or resilience.

Our individual taste journeys are likely to be very different, but that isn’t to say that categories of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ become entirely personal. There is, we know, a lot of overlap in what we come to steer away from, and what we pick our way toward. The import of the metaphor is that just because a work is very highly regarded by others, it doesn’t mean it’s the best next stop on your own expedition, and likewise, just because a poem has nothing to show or teach you does not mean it has no value to someone else. There is no single road and no single destination — no mountaintop representing the ultimate refined palate. Those who shortcut to what is popular and prestigious just because it is popular and prestigious risk getting lost, turning their reading into a performative act or form of presenteeism, rather than something that truly nourishes them.

And in fact, I think I can answer the question “how do you know you’re on track?”, because that’s where criticism comes in. Its role shouldn’t be to direct us to the poetry we ought to be reading, but rather, to provide insights into the taste journeys of others and how they decide what is of value to them. Criticism guides — but indirectly.

Can you get it badly wrong? Well, you can read a succession of poems that do absolutely nothing for you, but then you know something is awry and will probably try to fix it. The more insidious problem — and here I do sound a note of resistance — is avoiding growth and change, sticking to mild variations on what you know and can immediately grasp for the very reason that these are unlikely to shift your thinking. This is a trap that I — and others, it seems — suspect some fans of simplistic confessional verse fall into, but it’s equally possible for advocates of ornate and avant-garde styles to settle in one spot and never move forward. Ultimately, it’s a hard thing to judge from outside, because each significant step of a journey takes time, and we all rightly linger on the poetry that satisfies us.

But stagnation is what’s suggested to me whenever someone speaks very negatively of ‘most poetry’, whatever justification they offer. They imagine they are maintaining a high standard; I think they are retreating from the exercise of taste altogether — retreating, that is, from using poetry as a source of connection, wisdom and wonder, and allowing it to become, for them, a static hiding place.

So that is what I caution against, along with, obviously enough, an excess of insincere or skin-deep admiration based on a vague sense of a poem’s (or poet’s) power. Outside of that, the task of finding the best poetry to read, and of avoiding the ‘bad’ stuff (including, of course, actually writing more of the ‘bad’ stuff) is one each person must undertake for themselves, with critical discourse as a strategy-sharing system. Relieve yourself of any concern about your choices being objectively right.