I, too, dislike poetry

On The Poetry Society's National Poetry Prize Winner

The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition is, as it describes on its website, “One of the world’s most prestigious prizes.” It has, since 1978, been “a hugely important milestone in the careers of many of today’s leading poets.”

Its judges this year were three poets whose collective careers comprised many such milestones, including a Forward Prize, a PEN Heaney Prize, a shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, a longlist for the Jhalak Prize, and even two National Poetry Competition Prizes.

For this year’s prize the judges chose “The Gathering” by Partridge Boswell, a US poet from Vermont.

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The Gathering

Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows
grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via
crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed
world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.

A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,
period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse
upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons—
brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation

and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe.
Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair
to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11
or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air,

do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile
contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring
autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross
the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing

frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other
and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere
and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they
drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.
Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting

in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living
wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

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I read and reread this poem in a state of “perfect contempt” which Marianne Moore describes in “Poetry,” itself a much better poem, which begins

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Moore, one of the great 20th century poets, refers to a common attitude many have toward poetry, a hostility and impudence at the poet saying things a certain way. “The Gathering” is exactly the sort of poem I imagine Moore had in mind. Frivolous. Inscrutable. Flatulent. “So derivative as to become unintelligible.” All the accusations made against poetry today, its navel-gazing subjectivity, its pomposity, its poor grammar and form, its glibness, its speciousness, its vacuity, all of it can be found in “The Gathering.” It’s everything that makes us believe there are much more important things we’d rather be doing than reading poetry.

The poem opens with literal navel-gazing, or rather, ceiling staring. The poet is trying to make sense of all the terrible stuff he’s read on the news (he calls this sort of writing “meditating”) and the punctuation marks that will help organize his thoughts appear like a herd of tiny cows grazing “on the blank page of ceiling” [sic]. The cows “volunteer” to be the linguistic symbols of the poet’s next poem. This is somehow “yet another testament” to “a seamed world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.”

According to the Poetry Society’s website, Boswell said of his win: “Funny how this works: one minute, I’m spacing out, staring at the ceiling. Next, I’m on a flight to London…” One can believe that it happened like that, too. Boswell says the poem’s creation involved “following the media for a long while” and “writing elegies, parodies and rants to unpack my discomfort and disbelief, until the psychic toll became too great.” “The Gathering” seems to be all three, elegy, parody and rant, ground together and strained like playdoh through a mold of quatrains.

In “Poetry,” Moore wants to defend the value of poetry as “a place for the genuine.” She really does believe poems have the potential to affect us, to raise the hair and dilate the eyes. “These things are important,” she says, “not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful.”

What is useful about “The Gathering” is the portrait it paints, of a mind addled by the overconsumption of media and incapable of articulating anything meaningful about it. Thoughts are carried downstream like a river, continuous and undifferentiated, glinting with occasional rhyme and alliteration. Eddies of image and connotation swirl beside muddy banks before slipping again into the brown, meandering stream.

No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.

The “psychic toll” Boswell speaks of is apparent in the way he strains at any rational statement, and in the way there is an absence of insight into the nature of his experience. This is the Imitative Fallacy par excellence. If the thinking is amalgamated through association and non sequitur the poet has accurately, therefore successfully, represented their interior world.

The poem is about the poet’s desire to write down something that might help make sense of his feelings, but the feelings overwhelm him, he cannot do it. What we get instead are signs and signifiers whose emotional content corresponds roughly to what the poet wants to say. The blankness of a ceiling that is either like the sky after 9/11 or Gandhi’s mind after muddy boots had stomped it. Or like God’s silence on matters of suffering because he “drifts now nowhere and everywhere again,”

                               sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. 

The drifting of the metaphorical framework from one phrase to the next is presumably intentional, if incoherent. It mirrors God’s drifting “nowhere and everywhere again,” a painful platitude. But God is actually asleep in the churches of our cars, which is either a reference to the way a lot of American live out of their cars nowadays, or to the way we feel in the driver’s seat, in solitude, on the open road. I suspect the first, but I would bet that Boswell, and the judges, would say that any interpretation is the right one.

Nothing in the poem is apt, nothing of significance emerges from the churn of symbols, since there’s nothing the poet is either trying to say or understand. If we wanted to find out what really did feed a soul on its famished flight from those places of suffering, Boswell is not interested (he wouldn’t have anything interesting to say anyway), he’s on to the next association, to the “honey water you [him? we?] set on the sill last year.” Nothing has been said, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all expression. All vibes. Impotence and ignorance are some, and a sense, too, of personal guilt at something which is hinted at in the more idiosyncratic imagery, but which is hard to determine without context. Yvor Winters called this “pseudo-reference.” The reader has the sense that connections are being made, that there is some sort of internal logic at play, but are not given the context in the poem to come to that judgment themselves. They must take it on faith that the poet intends something, and is not just grabbing at bubbles in the mind.

Nothing happens until the end of the poem when the poet must, by virtue of conclusions, find some way of bringing things to an end.

                                                      Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

The poet takes refuge in writing, although this is cold comfort since language seems insufficient. “Meaning’s odometer is broken,” a phrase which seems like it should be in a much funnier poem. The theme of the failure of language, and the resentment at the realization that one must nevertheless use it, is a cliche in poetry. It’s akin to the novel about the writer or professor, or the movie about Hollywood. It’s meta-subject, often used as a substitute for actual substance. If one can’t find suitable material to write about, one can always write about writing. And if one can’t find something to say, one can always write about trying to find it. It’s popular among poets who, seeking always to 'transform' language or 'go beyond it,' are constantly disappointed or perplexed by its ineffectiveness.

But words being all a poet has, there must be some glimmer of hope at the end of “The Gathering,” however ambiguously made by so many mixed metaphors. The poet believes life will go on, something will survive, and the poem will flash like one of Auden’s ironic points of light, presumably for the same reason as Auden says: because the poet, deep down, believes he is one of the Just Ones, and has exchanged his important message, i.e. expressed himself.

Has anything actually been exchanged? Has anything really succeeded, if, as the poet says, “meaning’s odometer is broken?” I’m suspicious of the claim. The only thing that I know for sure has been accomplished, is that Partridge Boswell has won £5,000 and gained an important milestone in his career.

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In her poem, Moore says good poems are important “not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful.”

“The Gathering” is a bad poem, chosen, we’re told, from “more than 21,250 entries.” The judges, whose careers span many prizes, praised Boswell’s poem for its “emotional stakes” and for “the philosophical perspicacity of its ideas.”

“With its striking opening images of cows on a ‘blank page of ceiling’, the poem slowly unfurls, becoming an ever more expansive interrogation of language and morality.”

The word “interrogation” is doing a lot of work on the poem’s behalf.

The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere —

The throwaway “and elsewhere” made me laugh, as did the questions the judges thought the poem not only asked, but diagnosed and solved.

How do we maintain language’s potency amidst the anaesthetizing relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories? This poem both diagnoses the failures of our collective conscience and proposes through its logophilia the potential of language to challenge those failures.

The problem with poets, which Plato figured out two thousand years ago, is that they make stuff up. You see this all the time in the way poets talk about the work of other poets. They are incapable of not being poetic. They compulsively stretch the truth and make things appear other than they are. They want to break the bounds of language, as I mentioned before. Susannah Dickey, a judge of the contest, is one of these poets. “I’ll be looking for poems that sit uneasily with the very language they’re crafted from,” she says, blurbing for the launch of the competition, “poems that are frisson-ridden and dynamic.” By her own standards she has succeeded. She also says she wants to read poems “that feel like a collaboration between the poet’s intent and their acquiescence to that which remains uncontrollable.” I have no idea what this means. Dickey, the inaugural winner of the PEN Heaney Prize, probably doesn’t know what it means either. It doesn’t matter. Poets make stuff up all the time. That’s why Plato kicked them out, because they make stuff up and because they hide behind the license poetry affords them to do so. Just as the judges can say a great deal about “The Gathering” that isn’t true. The poem neither interrogates nor diagnoses nor proposes. At best you could say it “meditates.” More accurately, to quote Boswell, the poem “spaces out.”

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In Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” she says that good poetry must be distinguished from bad poetry when the issue is “dragged into prominence by half poets.” Such is the case with the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition, “one of the world’s most prestigious prizes.” I am not against poetry contests in principle (although I am against the careerism they breed). A good competition is a way of representing to the wider public the virtues and skills of its artform. Readers who don’t always read poetry might pick up a T.S. Eliot Prize winner. And they might judge from it the current state of the art. It should be something worthy of attention. A poem chosen for so “prestigious” an award as the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition should be of considerable merit. Sadly, “The Gathering” is not. Genuine poetry, Moore says, is like “an imaginary garden with real toads in it.” Boswell’s poem is an imaginary garden with imaginary toads in it. It’s fancy. Moore urges us instead to be “literalists of the imagination.” This is not unlike Plato, for the poets he allowed into his imaginary city were the ones who spoke the truth and whose aim was the Good. This requires poetry to be more than expression. It places obligations on the poet. To be useful, knowledgeable, artful, wise.

Last year’s winning poem, Fiona Larkin’s “Absence Has a Grammar” is a much better poem, which succeeds in all the ways that “The Gathering” fails. It’s simple, beautiful, touching. A more elegant and profound statement about the relationship between language and life. Read it and compare the two. Larkin’s poem is both delightful and useful in a way that Boswell’s is neither.