UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

What kind of poetics can we formulate out of and beyond our Post - Modern age? We live in such fractured and incoherent times it seems an impossible question.

Increasingly over the 20th Century poetry has been retiring from the public arena. It would seem a neutral act of cultural description to say that the power of the word has conceded to the power of the image and the power of the written word to the power of television, film and video. We live in the midst of a vast revolution in communications –in a veritable chaos of sign-making and a crisis in forms of representation. We have no choice but to recognize the way in which the various modes - the ephemeral intensities - of electronic communication shape the rhythm of our sensibility and expectation. Mass communications mark the age even as they fragment and make all things kaleidoscopic and ephemeral.

We live in a world of two-dimensional gliding surfaces, of constant stimulation and simulation, of quickly rising and fading simulacra. Our fast-moving lives are lived out against a background of global news, eclectic information, musical theme tunes, advertising images and general exclamatory hype. The individual is born into a verbal and visual maelstrom and often dies with it flickering and babbling over his head. The poems we make and sing must express, in however indirect a way, something of this cultural maelstrom, even as they struggle to point beyond it. They need not be Post Modernist - for irony and pastiche cannot take us very far into the hinterland of consciousness - but they must relate to our unprecedented cultural predicament. As poets we have to understand the actual cultural world in which we live but we do not have to coincide with it. For the gift of poetry involves prophetic insight and truth-telling. Our task, then, is not to adapt by becoming light entertainers but by forging the neccesary anti-thesis - to evoke lost possibilities, to express further patterns of connection and signification, to converse with banished angels and repressed demons,

to cancel and transcend. This might well describe the central insight that lies at the heart of Poetry Otherwise.

Yet the Post-Modernists are right in one respect; they warn us of the dangerous

seductions of Grand Theory and Master Narratives - for our sense of life is deeply broken and in the age of internet, video, television and a market-directed global economy there can be little hope for a national cultural centre other than that determined by vested interests and multi-national companies. For the moment the poet can only occupy the extreme edge, a precarious landscape of shadows where the light is cast by an eclipsed sun. This is not meant to invite despair but merely to urge that we face directly the predicament of poetry and then to consider whether the negative can in certain definable ways be redeemed.. For on the edges real lives still unfold, and where life unfolds art can still be created and the spirit, transgressing the repressive materialism of the age,can still darkly flourish. To make the point with an example. I would suggest that there is more fulfilment in reading a new poem to a friend or to a gathering to mark a wedding or a funeral than to have it published in The Times Literary Supplement or The New York Review of Books where any exchange may well be entirely mechanical and as unreal and as abstract as a small cheque in the post some months later.

The Greek poet Cavafy never offered his volumes for sale - the work was privately printed and given as gifts of the spirit to those individuals who might appreciate their narratives, images and cadences. Cafavy exemplifies the convivial poetics I want to advance. But first we must consider the precarious condition of poetry in post-modern culture - the very condition which calls for a movement such as Poetry Otherwise.

Contemporary poets know they are invisible survivors and that the great genre they represent is a threatened animal in the ecology of culture. A few figures make the situation clear. The late American Poet Laureate, Joseph Brodsky, pointed out how a standard publishing house in America bringing out a volume of poems would aim at 0.0001% of the entire population. Poetry journals in Britain - generally subsidized – sell between 200 and 800 copies, mostly to poets who publish or desperately hope to publish in them. A new volume of poetry, on average, will sell about the same number. These slim books, generally unreviewed in the major papers and weeklies, sitting on a few library shelves have a forlorn semi-existence - a phantom life. Poetry,it has been said, is now only read by poets. Such a terrible contraction in less than a hundred years has created a poetry mafia and a poetry ghetto - a no-go area guarded internally

by a small mafiosi - and a general regression into a kind of narcissism and a cult of the ironic. It was Cyril Connolly who once epitomised modern poets as squabbling jackals snarling over a dried-up well. And , indeed, often it would seem to be so.

By now it must have become clear that any convivial poetics for our time must not be confused with the naive or the ironic or the suburban. Rather, I believe it must be mapped inside a remarkable culture that goes back and back: from T S Eliot and Paul Celan and Mandelstam, through Coleridge and Goethe, through Shakespeare and Dante, to Ovid, Sappho and Homer - and to the shamans and myth-makers before them.There can be no escaping the tradition for , again and again, an individual word will carry ancient poetic sediment and one of the poet’ s tasks - as language is the poet’ s medium - is to shake the hidden pollen and seeds that lie there, to allow for a new and quite unexpected fertilization. An endless linguistic resurrection! Not to work the deep geology of language is to fail the medium.

It is similar with images and rhythms. One immediate contemporary image coming into the imagination will often relate to another in the tradition and both may relate to a single archetypal configuration. A fusion takes place securing, at once, spiritual depth and a rich tangle of historic association. One of the tasks of the poet is to take a particular image into its deep imaginal field and by so doing increase the supply of psychic energy available. Such acts of connection widen our sense of what it is to be human and free us from the worst elements of electronic and commercial culture – the banality of slogans, brand names, jargon, immediate mass-think. In this sense, the poet is a cultural ecologist, a bridge-builder, one who draws different worlds together that another harder journey may continue, that the future may not fall into the abyss. The poem is a magnet drawing together in a new forward constellation the complex associations, rhythms, images already often present in or under the culture. Thus the past enters the present and unfolds into the future, a single creative gestalt working

through time.

How then are we to reanimate poetry in our times? I want to suggest we de-professionalize it - that we free it from The Arts Council, from Poetry Competitions, from small groups squabbling for small advantage. I want to suggest that we move dialectically - that we conceive poetry as essential to the fabric of our daily intimate lives and yet, at the same time, root it fiercely in the transcendent and Other, that we drive these two energies together until they become one force, one reality, a lived poetics.

I am haunted by the image of the Greek poet Sappho making her sharp lyrical poetry out of the daily circumstances of her life; out of her inner life of feeling as it unfolded in relationship to her actual life and circumstances. ‘ Let us suppose,’ writes the scholar Richard Jenkyns, ‘ that the complete works of Sappho had survived. We should have had, if we can judge from the existing fragments, a remarkable picture of the daily life and concerns of a circle of friends (and enemies).’ One of the surviving fragments of Sappho reads quite simply:

Day in, day out,

I hunger and

I struggle.

It would seem, out of this daily hunger and struggle - close to music and dance and intimate with the gods and goddesses - issued her lyrical poems.

But, of course, there is nothing vague about such poetic activity. It requires a

dialectical cast of mind, bringing together in one manifold contrary dispositions of the psyche. On one side, we have the tranced submission to pre-conceptual - even pre-linguistic - sources of inspiration:

I took my lyre and said

Come now my heavenly tortoise shell

Become a speaking instrument...

And, on the other side of this tranced conversion of music into sound, there is

something quite different: a profound application to the craft of poetry, to a body of techniques for rendering experience into memorable forms, into the verbal temples of enduring significance. Sappho in another fragment - she is destined to remain the poet of fragments, of broken narratives and melodies and relationships:which gives her a strange unexpected contemporaneity - declared:

It is the Muses

Who have caused me

To be honoured; they

Taught me their craft.

Thus trance and technique, seen as complementary forces of the creative act, are both at the service of the poetic enunciation of life’ s meanings and possibilities in the encompassing context of an intimate community:

Tell every-one

Now today I shall

Sing beautifully for

My friends’ pleasure.

Here is an image of poetry in action, doing intimate work, heightening experience by creating symbols for it. And in the cultural background - though ‘ background’ is too detached a word for what I am describing - one senses a play of divine forces and dramatic presences. Here is an animated universe re-animated and driven forward both by the rhythmic pulse of the lyric and the elected metaphor in intimate relationship to the drama of life. To evoke Sappho is not, of course, to petition a return to the past. That is always and for ever impossible. For better and for worse, we occupy a very different cultural time and space. Yet the image and example of Sappho suggests a convivial poetics - an intimacy in writing out of our lives, a meeting the world with the living word, an existential aesthetics on the edge with an exploratory commitment to love and friendship and life. Perhaps such values translated into the harsher idiom of our own times could contribute to the renewal of our sad and withered art and foster a new orientation to our work? Indeed, help shape a poetry otherwise.

Yet there is another urgent world of disintegrating experience which Sappho has now to enter, a world that returns me to the Post-Modern concerns I outlined at the beginning. To take us into this theme I would like to reflect on the last short autobiographical book of the poet-philosopher, Gillian Rose. The volume is called Love’ s Work and was published some months before the author’ s death from cancer at the age of 48. I see Gillian Rose as a contemporary metaphysical Sappho whose fractured prose-poem Love’ s Work sings out of the pain and paradox of post-modern existence. In this lyrical work - the fact that it is not written by a professional poet may, alas, be significant - she evokes our own broken world, with its paradoxical desires, its fatal diseases and its tattered social fabric. The fact that she is dying of cancer as she writes is crucial to the struggle of the book, as also that she is writing from the vulnerable heart of her very reflective being. Her fractured work evokes in its sparse but precise imagery a disintegrating world. The description of Jim’ s death of AIDS in a New York flat with his philosophical books in their original languages, Greek, German and

French, all scored with dirt, infested with cockroaches, stale with dust and debris is a modern Sappho fragment. It casts onto our imagination a desolate image of the end of a long civilization. The aim, again and again thwarted, of Gillian Rose’ s short lyrical work is to find a metaphysical language that will hold our warring paradoxes together. It is crucial to the book that these paradoxes are often released in and through the power and pain of love relationships and that we must find a metaphysical way of affirming our fragile lives that does not betray their complexity. Her book ends with a short prose poem:

‘ I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing,grieving,

trusting, working, reposing - in this sin of language and lips.’

Another Sappho utterance which could be set to music - which is, in its own right, a musical as well as a metaphysical utterance.

At or near the end of History Sappho cannot be the person she was at the beginning. She has to change - even while her gifts and obsessions remain. The struggle – day in, day out, over so many centuries, over so much conflicting experience,after so much intellectual arguments, after so many moral devastations, after so much knowledge –necessitates inner developments of an extreme and uneasy kind. Today the background of the gods cannot be taken for granted and the innocence of sexuality has gone forever. The waters washing the small island of Lesbos are badly polluted and the banner of Lyrical Poetry has been taken down for the international banner of Coca-Cola. Yet Sappho’ s need for love remains and the loss of the gods creates a new conscious impulse in her for metaphysical grounding. This new need with the collapse of accepted religious structures and, indeed, all backgrounds has become all but obsessional. Yet she knows she is still very human, very vulnerable, crazy and in quest - and that the power of the word is still there to express and explore her historically unprecedented predicament. For poetry is not so much a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold claimed, as the creation of new life, a means of intensifying, deepening and expanding our existence.

The poem comes out of the engaged act of individual life. We have no choice but to begin where we are and where we find ourselves in relationship to others, as well as to Nature and to the realm of Spirit. We need an exacting, paradoxical, convivial poetics: a poetics that keeps both metaphysical anguish and metaphysical hope alive and trembling.

I offer these reflections as one first possible mapping of the emerging land-mass of Poetry Otherwise. It is not definitive. How could it be? The new continent is still

emerging.

Peter Abbs is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sussex.He is Poetry Editor of Resurgence and has recently published his sixth volume of poetry LOVE AFTER SAPPHO.