Wednesday was a thought-provoking day.The first Nadfas lecture of the new season was a presentation of Joaquín Sorolla, a Valencian Spanish painter working at the turn of the last century. He is chiefly famous for his depiction of light, and the paintings he is best known for are beach scenes with children and women in gossamer clothing. I loved them. As far as I could tell everyone else at the lecture seemed to love them too. My friend, who is herself an artists, hated them. She thought them shallow and kitsch. I might have heard her mutter ‘chocolate box.’ For me on a grey day at the end of a beautifully bright and light-filled summer they were as welcome as the bowl of sunflowers, mimicking the missed sunshine in my living-room.
In one of those lightbulb moments I realised I’ve been having the same feelings of irritation as my artist friend about ‘nice’ poetry that seems to me shallow, and whatever the verbal equivalent of kitsch is. Once they would have been disparagingly termed ‘low-brow,’ but now that term sounds snobbish, so very unfashionable. The buzz-word is ‘accessibility.’ Poetry has to be ‘accessible.’ Easily understood, immediate in its impact, with obvious, sentimental or overly dramatic imagery that doesn’t cause the reader a furrowed brow. Poetry like this is proliferating like dandelions and ragwort, both highly successful weeds.
At school we read Chaucer in the original. It was a challenge and I loved it. I loved the sound of Middle-English. I loved Shakespeare and Milton. They could be a challenge too; we had to learn a little of the language and culture of their days to fully appreciate them. William Blake - not a magazine read! T.S.Eliot. Virginia Woolf. Yeats. James Joyce. Not pool-side reading but all opening our minds into new worlds.
I’ve continued to like a challenge in my literature, something that make me think, gives me a new gestalt of life around me. My almost complete lack of formal education in visual art (I’ve been to a shed-load of exhibitions in my time) means I’m generally content to be pleased with a first impression that doesn’t make me exercise my brain or open new windows of enlightenment. I’m generally happy for visual art to be merely ‘accessible.’
But not poetry.
Of course it does mean that my own poems are acceptable. But is a club that will let me in worth joining?
Later. I came across an interview with Mary Oliver who a poet I sometimes admire and sometimes and bored by. At the end of the interview she said:
"One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear," Oliver adds. "It mustn't be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are, they sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem."
There were several waspish comments about this on the NPR site but none said what I thought: Quite often all M.O.herself gives is a picture of what she has seen in the natural world around her. She doesn't give a new experience at all. So does this mean her poems are all unnecessary - at least unnecessary to me? We all make remarks without thinking but this one I find rather provocative.
