George Szirtes
"What I hope to do in this series of short articles is to provide a sketch map of contemporary English-language and, to a lesser extent, European poetry. I do not sketch them as a scholar might but as a poet talking about his own craft and love. I cannot hope to be exhaustive or authoritative but I hope to be useful in the way a sketch-map is." George Szirtes.
A warm and self denying person, being honored with his friendship and knowing his extraordinary work in the field of literature , I asked him to show us around the modern poetry arena in England, Europe and any other country he finds suitable. he kindly started a series of articles in a simple toned language in order to respond to our need in knowing more about writing and its techniques and horizons abroad...big thanx from PETA! SKETCH-MAPPING THE DELTA
A personal sketch-map guide to influences and confluences
in contemporary Anglophone and European, poetry 1 Foreword When I began as an English-language poet almost forty years ago I had no background in poetry. We were a Hungarian refugee family from the failed revolution of 1956 and while it was common practice for Hungarians to learn poems by heart in schools, so everyone knew some famous Hungarian poems - my parents did not read poetry in English and knew little about it. There were no books of poetry on the shelves. I myself was preparing for a medical career involving sciences so when poetry came to me at the age of seventeen it was all new and surprising. I finished my science subjects but did badly so couldn’t study medicine. I couldn’t study English Literature either because I had the wrong qualifications for that. Art colleges could, however, admit me on the basis of a satisfactory or promising portfolio of work. So I switched to fine art, spending five years at art colleges and becoming a painter while continuing privately as a poet. Although I had no formal introduction to poetry I read very widely and without discrimination. I read poets because someone mentioned them, because I found an interesting reference to one in a book, or because the book was in a cheap paperback or in a second-hand shop. (I had very little money and soon I was married and a father.) I didn’t have to read poetry for examination only for my own vehement interest and curiosity so I ignored critical literature and focused on the text alone. It was only at art college that I met two highly regarded poets, one of whom - Martin Bell - ran an afternoon class for anyone who was interested. I attended his class throughout my three years there. He would bring along paper copies of a few poems by important modern English-language poets for reading and discussion. Bell’s classes were my first introduction to several poets. It was like a new world. The territory opened before me and I began to see the various poets in some mysterious relation to each other. Nevertheless it took a great deal more unguided personal reading to get an idea of what had happened and was still happening around me as a poet and where I myself might be or develop to be. What I hope to do in this series of short articles is to provide a sketch map of contemporary English-language and, to a lesser extent, European poetry. I do not sketch them as a scholar might but as a poet talking about his own craft and love. I cannot hope to be exhaustive or authoritative but I hope to be useful in the way a sketch-map is. 2 Why a Delta We often talk in terms of a main-stream, or of currents or counter-currents in literature, borrowing these water-based terms from the idea of time as a river and the development of any aspect of human experience as a complex flow that we experience in two main ways, either standing on the notional bank of the river and noting everything that happens in it or by being in the stream ourselves aware of being swept forward. We may be in or standing by one river but there may be others. Which is the main one? It always seems to be the one we happen to be examining. My sense of the delta is of a place where a river or several rivers, having joined in what appears to be a major stream, the whole has split up into various channels before ending at the sea. I was once taken on a boat tour of the Danube Delta in Romania and this was the impression it made on me: a confluence and divergence at once. Are we in a great rushing stream or in a channel of the delta? The unitary river is behind us, the sea ahead. This extended metaphor has its uses. Our consciousness of the river is primarily retrospective. We construct an image of the river by selective reading, by understanding the past in terms of the present. That is not how the past understood itself. Perhaps it has always been a delta. Perhaps the various constructions of the river as the past are bound to be contested. Perhaps what we consider to be the proper understanding of the river will be changed in the future. The western understanding of the past is particularly riverine. We trace it in technological and political terms. One scientific invention leads to another. Every discovery opens a new stage in development and each development is an advance. In the same way one form of political power is surpassed by another. Each advance is an improvement in some respect. Despite setbacks and reaction humankind is steadily moving towards an ever happier state of affairs. Needless to say this is a secular process, part Marx, part Darwin, part Industrial Revolution. Modernism in art and literature springs from the same understanding. It understands itself as a stream, as advance, as progress. Reading it backwards we see major innovations as inevitable changes in the direction of the forward flow. Retrospectively, everything is inevitable because we make it so. The excitement of a fast current, the great surges in the tide, the rapids of history may convince us we are in the same stream, but at any one moment our personal situation is uncertain (and may be better for being so). The delta is all around us and we may simply be in a channel of it. And, of course, if this is a delta there must have been a river. George Szirtes |
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tracking poetry through anthologies
It is possible to chart poetic development through the anthologies of a period. For poets of my generation, that is those who began writing in the sixties, the most important would have beem The Faber Book of Modern Verse first edited by Michael Roberts in 1936 as revised by Donald Hall in 1965, and The New Poetry, edited by A Alvarez in 1962. Both contained poems by both British and American poets, as well as Irish poets writing in English. The first lined up the major Modernist figures before and between the wars adding some contemporary poets in a supplement that in 1982 was revised by Peter Porter, the second began with the American ‘confessionals’ Berryman, Lowell, Sexton and Plath before exploring British poetry. These were not by any means the only anthologies but they were the ones everyone seriously interested in poetry was expected to have. Apart from the Americans we were then expected to know Dylan Thomas (died 1953), MacNeice (died in 1963) Auden (died 1973) and, after the war, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and possibly Geoffrey Hill.
Alternative traditions, including the Liverpool Scene (Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten) and the influence of the American Beats were represented by Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, edited by Michael Horovitz in 1969. Poets like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Charles Olson and The Black Mountain School generally were available and, in some quarters, central, as much as Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs was, but they were not generally on the school or university syllabus. At much the same time Penguin books had a big series not only of British poets but of European, African and South American ones, though these developed chiefly in the seventies by which time first Hughes’s Crow, and the poets of the Irish Troubles such as Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Tom Paulin, and chiefly, Seamus Heaney had arrived, with Tony Harrison, Tom Paulin, Craig Raine closely behind, all of whom were to be celebrated in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion in 1982
This list of names constitutes more a catalogue than a guide but it represents the ground we grew up on. (My own first book didn’t appear until 1979 so was too late even for the Morrison / Motion anthology). How we chose which part of the ground we ourselves occupied depended on our background and education. The Black Mountain route lay through university. What appeared to be the core division between Larkin’s conservative yet social humanism on one side and Hughes and Plath’s ventures into self and feral nature on the other was simply the most visible. Edwrad Lucie-Smith’s 1970 British Poetry since 1945 attempted a different kind of mapping, with sub-headings such as The Movement, Expressionists, The Group, Influences from Abroad, and others, including Dissenters, Scotland and New Voices, and - in later editions - classes such as University Wits (I was included in the later edtions possibly under Influences from Abroad).
That map served us quite well until 1993 when the map expanded.
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