Quantcast
Channel: Poetry | The Guardian
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Is contemporary poetry really in 'a rotten state' - or just a new one?

0
0

Rose Tremain and Robin Robertson have criticised poets for abandoning ‘craft’ – but that argument silences the possibilities offered by new voices

Novelist Rose Tremain thinks poetry these days is overrated. “Let’s dare to say it out loud: contemporary poetry is in a rotten state,” she told the TLS this week. “Having binned all the rules, most poets seem to think that rolling out some pastry-coloured prose, adding a sprinkling of white space, then cutting it up into little shapelets will do. I’m fervently hoping for something better soon.”

Had Tremain really managed to miss the whole of modernism? After all, the modernists swore they had “binned all the rules” at or around the end of the 19th century. For anyone, much less a writer, 20th-century modernist poets are hard to miss; whether it is the sediments of Eliot or Pound, or the brilliant treasures of HD, Mina Loy or Hope Mirrlees. Had Tremain leapt over the cross-currents of the next 100 years from Tennyson to Walter de la Mare to Philip Larkin, flat-footing it on their bald, smooth verse to land on some plaintive lyrical bank of our new century?

Identity-based poetry is not just the preserve of marginalised voices – white men have been writing it for centuries

Related: Robin Robertson: ‘The poetry world is polarised. I’m in the middle, vaguely appalled’

Continue reading...

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images