Slightly off topic, but I was similarly iffy about Clive James until I came across the songs he wrote with Pete Atkin - their first two albums are a lot of fun, occaisionally quite beautiful (though there isn't a medium he can't be long-winded in!). Really I think he was a lyricist - I wonder if there wasn't some self-imposed snobbery on his part in not embracing that though of course that kind of partnership means sharing the plaudits.... I enjoyed Poetry Notebook too, though found it got a bit one note. I don't think he's a particularly good advocate for Larkin, for instance, despite admiring him so much!
How interesting, I bet you're right (that creatively he was really a lyricist). Totally agree that PN gets a little predictable after a while, and some of the pieces are more substantial than others, but I still think there should be WAY more poetry criticism of that general type: informed, enthusiastic, well-written and designed to entice rather than put you off. Actually I thought some of the most revealing moments where when he, occasionally and uncharacteristically, pulled his punches.
Yes he's a real loss and I can't think of anyone that fills it. The idea that the same person could be writing for Poetry magazine and doing TV chatshows! And (which is connected to your conversation with Jon) he specifically writes about metre accessibly/enthusiastically/enticingly. Curious to go back now and find the pulled punches....
I picked up Poetry Notebook in the wonderful G David Bookshop on Cambridge between lockdowns, and it was a literary searchlight for me during that dark time - witty, focused, sure of the importance of poetry and passionate about something other than the ongoing pandemic. It picked up from where face to face poetry classes and groups had left off, for me.
Thanks for commenting Harriet. James has such a strong "voice" you can really hear him in the room with you -- I can just imagine how that would have felt like essential company at that moment in time. I read it on successive evenings while supervising my youngest in the bath -- not the circs most conducive to concentration but he really cut through all the noise (and stray water!).
A) Ian Duhig is certainly the funniest poet on Twitter.
B) Thanks for such a thoughtful review of this prize winning work. I think that, as so often with a review that isn’t purely positive, I am more inclined to read the work rather than less, to engage with your thoughts and to join in the discussion.
I absolutely agree Harriet -- I don't think it helps *anyone* to have a culture of such monotonously positive poetry reviewing, including the poets under review. Like you, I am much more likely to seek out a book where the review was mixed or even hostile, in order to make my own mind up. As I mentioned at the start of this post (https://vamoul.substack.com/p/reading-a-new-poet) I almost never buy a book of poetry on the basis of a completely positive review -- which means in practice that though I read loads of poetry reviews I almost never buy a book on the strength of one. I think the only exceptions are where it's an unusually long review, with ample quotation (so I feel like I've had a chance to read it myself) and where the particular reviewer has already earned my trust by nuanced judgements on previous collections.
Hi Victoria -- agree with the comment by V. Penelope below, and to add to that: I think the reason readers increasingly look to books of poems for memoir-like content is in part that the quality of 'music' is so mysterious and hard to locate. I haven't got through all of Allen-Paisant's book yet and haven't yet hit on an aspect I really rate, but if I'm honest, the comparison you make here between his lines' lack of musicality and Duhig's 'formal mastery' completely fails to convince me. Duhig's lines are more regularly portioned, but that also makes them harder (for me) to follow, since that regularity is in tension with the normal flow of a sentence, resulting in more of a stop-start rhythm and a sense that everything is more bunched up. The fact that the first two lines are in near-perfect iambic pentameter but subsequent lines don't keep this up also comes across as a slight fumbling of the ball, particularly when we get to 'judged her run-up to some cooling cow-shit', which you have to read in a completely unnatural way if you want it to fit the scheme. Both examples seem fine -- they work in different ways, and ask different things of the reader. But it's not at all clear to me why one should be considered to be starkly superior. And this is coming from someone who has been reading poetry for most of their adult life.
This is not to say that your preference is misguided -- just that it perhaps has less to do with skill/mastery as it has to do with the different sets of expectations each of us arrives with, and since we cannot properly account for how varied these expectations are and where they come from, readers are unifying instead around some other principle of composition.
Thanks so much Jon -- this is just the kind of comment I was hoping to receive! It is so fascinating and revealing. I think you are absolutely right that an awful lot of even committed readers of poetry today struggle to hear and appreciate "traditional" metrical poetry and in that sense the "traditional" title is increasingly a misnomer. (It stops being a tradition if it's not passed on!) I have also noticed that quite a few poets who do demonstrably have a great ear and are doing quite sophisticated metrical things (perhaps unconsciously or only semi-consciously) aren't comfortable with describing what they are doing. That's partly why in this blog I generally try to write explicitly about metre, though I didn't in this post and perhaps should have done so at least in one instance: people, even professional critics, rarely write about metre explicitly in English which is a real shame, though it does take up a lot of words to do it well and clearly. One of the pleasures of a substack is that I don't have a word limit but I don't want to test my readers' patience too much!
I'd say a few things here. The first is that Duhig writes in a very wide variety of forms -- not only things like sonnets (and in fact I hesitated over choosing this one for that reason) -- with in my view great technical expertise across all of them. But that technical expertise is far from his only virtue. I chose this poem partly because it is funny, it takes aim at some of our expectations about the proper subjects for poetry, but it also takes seriously someone else's perspective and pleasures, even when we might find them unexpected or uncongenial. It also, in an unshowy way, contains a whole series of wonderful, precise images -- bleaching sheets, the biscuits on the tablecloth, Mass-wafer thin [the wafer that will be broken as it is at the consecration], the eggshell. Tonally it feels very carefully judged: the humour and affection and hint of sibling send-up in "All dewy-eyed", "She skipped" -- and then the enigmatic and unexpected opening out into something like aphorism in the very final line.
I found your response to his poem fascinating and I think it is a great example of how, as you say, the readers' skills and experiences are just as important, if not in fact more so, than those of the poet -- since if they don't match up at least to some extent, you don't have readers or they don't fully appreciate what you're doing; though if they match up too perfectly you also can't do anything very original. If you just give people what they think they want it won't be anything new.
I was particularly struck by your point that you can't "make" line 9 (with the cow shit) fit "the scheme" unless you read it unnaturally. This is obviously true. But you're not meant to force it to fit. The first lines of the poem -- as you rightly note and as is often true -- establish the metre of the piece and it is on that basis that the poet can then vary the rhythm for effect. Line 9 diverges farthest but few of the lines are perfect iambic pentameters after the first -- most are not perfectly iambic and/or do not have five stresses. As is very common in English poetry throughout its history, whatever the textbooks say, the line often slips towards 4 rather than 5 -- e.g. I'd say like GINGer BIScuits on a TABle CLOTH (capitals = stresses). It would be very artificial to stress ON here. In line 9 three stresses are clustered at the end of the line -- I think most people would probably say JUDGED her RUN-up to some COOLing COW SHIT, so we have the little patter of the run-up itself in that series of unstressed syllables in the middle of the line and then the witty emphasis (anticipating the landing) falling upon those very Anglo-Saxon monosyllables at the end, which in terms of diction -- the register and the association of the word -- as well as sound are a departure in the poem. Duhig is sensitive here to syllable quantity as well as stress -- features which often but do not always align in English. (By quantity I mean how long the sounds take to pronounce: I am trying to gloss in this reply any terms that might not be clear to everyone -- not because I don't think you personally won't understand them, but because I know I have quite a few non-native-English speaker readers who might be following the debate in these comments.)
I don't want to give the impression that I only like or appreciate formal poetry, which is very far from the truth. (And indeed, the poetry I write myself takes a whole range of forms.) I do think poetry should be written to be heard -- so in that sense should have some kind of musicality -- but that can take many shapes, and many of my favourite poets write free verse. (In fact, I've worked quite a bit on free verse in Latin, which is a niche poetic interest if ever there was one.) My disappointment with Allen-Paisant is not that his poetry is unmusical but more that its musicality does not seem entirely under his control: it feels under-revised and undigested. This links I think to other elements of the collection -- that there's quite a lot of repetition and redundancy, and some outright cliché. These could all be intentional choices, of course, but I didn't feel convinced that they were; or that, if they were, they were artistically successful.
Duhig’s humor kind of wins me over. Looking at some of the poems on the Only Poems site, I’m reminded of how essential humor is to many poets. I also like just about any poem that integrates quotes or dialogue into the metrical scheme, as Stallings does in her own sonnet-like poem:
And yes, I think we’re meant to hear the initial punch of “judged” and “guessed” as a variation from the other lines where the verb tends to begin at the second or fourth syllable — this is the winding up of the spring that’s released in line 11.
Hi Victoria -- thanks for this response, and especially for going into more detail about what you value in Duhig's work. I have one collection of his that I haven't revisited in a while -- my memory of it is that, as in this short extract, I found the structuring of the poems to be slightly too reliant on slippage to be technically impressive (where a poet like W.N. Herbert, Glyn Maxwell or Tony Harrison tends to really stick to the form) and, more crucially, that it jarred with the tone or register of the poem to the point where I found it a little awkward to read.
For instance, you're right that I would read that line normally as "JUDGED her RUN-up to some COOLing COW SHIT", and the only reason I say it doesn't fit the meter established in the first two lines is that, once a meter is established, I will try to make the rest of the poem fit that meter as I read it, as if it were a drumbeat going on in the background. When a beat is missed, I expect it to emphasise something -- recently, for instance, I marked a student's poem where the change in metrical pattern part way through comes at a point in the poem's narrative where things are becoming more frantic and loose. In this poem, though, the variation just seems random -- the beat stops being regular, as if the drummer were distracted. I struggle against the impression that the poet has just given up for the sake of convenience at line 3, then settles again into a regular meter at line 5, only to lose it again part way through line 8.
I can follow what you say about the almost-'splatter' of the words COW SHIT being placed where they are, and I think I would have detected it myself if that had been a more singular anomaly.
I find the imagery similarly haphazard -- mostly it works, but fields as some variation of white sheets is kind of a cliche, and I can't make footprints in the snow marry up with any memory I have of ginger biscuits on a tablecloth. I find myself picturing something closer to the pattern of holes in a lace tablecloth.
In terms of tone and subject matter, I can't find anything to criticise but it also feels fairly unremarkable in the present landscape of poetry, where there are (quite rightly) a great many poems that focus on everyday minor joys and sillinesses. All of this is not to express any particular misgivings with Duhig, but just to emphasise again that I find it hard to agree in this instance (and as is the case in almost every instance) that there is a gulf of technical ability between the two poets.
In fact, this experience has become so commonplace for me that my conclusion at the moment is that comparative assessment of technical ability -- as if it were something one could measure, like weight or muscle strength -- is a critical dead end. That's not to say that technical ability is non-existent, but that it isn't all happening according to any consistent set of standards or expectations, and so when we look at Allen-Paisant's work we have to talk about what *is* there and what it's doing, rather than what we think ought to be there.
Slightly off topic, but I was similarly iffy about Clive James until I came across the songs he wrote with Pete Atkin - their first two albums are a lot of fun, occaisionally quite beautiful (though there isn't a medium he can't be long-winded in!). Really I think he was a lyricist - I wonder if there wasn't some self-imposed snobbery on his part in not embracing that though of course that kind of partnership means sharing the plaudits.... I enjoyed Poetry Notebook too, though found it got a bit one note. I don't think he's a particularly good advocate for Larkin, for instance, despite admiring him so much!
How interesting, I bet you're right (that creatively he was really a lyricist). Totally agree that PN gets a little predictable after a while, and some of the pieces are more substantial than others, but I still think there should be WAY more poetry criticism of that general type: informed, enthusiastic, well-written and designed to entice rather than put you off. Actually I thought some of the most revealing moments where when he, occasionally and uncharacteristically, pulled his punches.
Yes he's a real loss and I can't think of anyone that fills it. The idea that the same person could be writing for Poetry magazine and doing TV chatshows! And (which is connected to your conversation with Jon) he specifically writes about metre accessibly/enthusiastically/enticingly. Curious to go back now and find the pulled punches....
I picked up Poetry Notebook in the wonderful G David Bookshop on Cambridge between lockdowns, and it was a literary searchlight for me during that dark time - witty, focused, sure of the importance of poetry and passionate about something other than the ongoing pandemic. It picked up from where face to face poetry classes and groups had left off, for me.
Thanks for commenting Harriet. James has such a strong "voice" you can really hear him in the room with you -- I can just imagine how that would have felt like essential company at that moment in time. I read it on successive evenings while supervising my youngest in the bath -- not the circs most conducive to concentration but he really cut through all the noise (and stray water!).
Lots of readers want books of poems to be novels or memoir. I suppose this trend will only increase.
A) Ian Duhig is certainly the funniest poet on Twitter.
B) Thanks for such a thoughtful review of this prize winning work. I think that, as so often with a review that isn’t purely positive, I am more inclined to read the work rather than less, to engage with your thoughts and to join in the discussion.
I absolutely agree Harriet -- I don't think it helps *anyone* to have a culture of such monotonously positive poetry reviewing, including the poets under review. Like you, I am much more likely to seek out a book where the review was mixed or even hostile, in order to make my own mind up. As I mentioned at the start of this post (https://vamoul.substack.com/p/reading-a-new-poet) I almost never buy a book of poetry on the basis of a completely positive review -- which means in practice that though I read loads of poetry reviews I almost never buy a book on the strength of one. I think the only exceptions are where it's an unusually long review, with ample quotation (so I feel like I've had a chance to read it myself) and where the particular reviewer has already earned my trust by nuanced judgements on previous collections.
Hi Victoria -- agree with the comment by V. Penelope below, and to add to that: I think the reason readers increasingly look to books of poems for memoir-like content is in part that the quality of 'music' is so mysterious and hard to locate. I haven't got through all of Allen-Paisant's book yet and haven't yet hit on an aspect I really rate, but if I'm honest, the comparison you make here between his lines' lack of musicality and Duhig's 'formal mastery' completely fails to convince me. Duhig's lines are more regularly portioned, but that also makes them harder (for me) to follow, since that regularity is in tension with the normal flow of a sentence, resulting in more of a stop-start rhythm and a sense that everything is more bunched up. The fact that the first two lines are in near-perfect iambic pentameter but subsequent lines don't keep this up also comes across as a slight fumbling of the ball, particularly when we get to 'judged her run-up to some cooling cow-shit', which you have to read in a completely unnatural way if you want it to fit the scheme. Both examples seem fine -- they work in different ways, and ask different things of the reader. But it's not at all clear to me why one should be considered to be starkly superior. And this is coming from someone who has been reading poetry for most of their adult life.
This is not to say that your preference is misguided -- just that it perhaps has less to do with skill/mastery as it has to do with the different sets of expectations each of us arrives with, and since we cannot properly account for how varied these expectations are and where they come from, readers are unifying instead around some other principle of composition.
Thanks so much Jon -- this is just the kind of comment I was hoping to receive! It is so fascinating and revealing. I think you are absolutely right that an awful lot of even committed readers of poetry today struggle to hear and appreciate "traditional" metrical poetry and in that sense the "traditional" title is increasingly a misnomer. (It stops being a tradition if it's not passed on!) I have also noticed that quite a few poets who do demonstrably have a great ear and are doing quite sophisticated metrical things (perhaps unconsciously or only semi-consciously) aren't comfortable with describing what they are doing. That's partly why in this blog I generally try to write explicitly about metre, though I didn't in this post and perhaps should have done so at least in one instance: people, even professional critics, rarely write about metre explicitly in English which is a real shame, though it does take up a lot of words to do it well and clearly. One of the pleasures of a substack is that I don't have a word limit but I don't want to test my readers' patience too much!
I'd say a few things here. The first is that Duhig writes in a very wide variety of forms -- not only things like sonnets (and in fact I hesitated over choosing this one for that reason) -- with in my view great technical expertise across all of them. But that technical expertise is far from his only virtue. I chose this poem partly because it is funny, it takes aim at some of our expectations about the proper subjects for poetry, but it also takes seriously someone else's perspective and pleasures, even when we might find them unexpected or uncongenial. It also, in an unshowy way, contains a whole series of wonderful, precise images -- bleaching sheets, the biscuits on the tablecloth, Mass-wafer thin [the wafer that will be broken as it is at the consecration], the eggshell. Tonally it feels very carefully judged: the humour and affection and hint of sibling send-up in "All dewy-eyed", "She skipped" -- and then the enigmatic and unexpected opening out into something like aphorism in the very final line.
I found your response to his poem fascinating and I think it is a great example of how, as you say, the readers' skills and experiences are just as important, if not in fact more so, than those of the poet -- since if they don't match up at least to some extent, you don't have readers or they don't fully appreciate what you're doing; though if they match up too perfectly you also can't do anything very original. If you just give people what they think they want it won't be anything new.
I was particularly struck by your point that you can't "make" line 9 (with the cow shit) fit "the scheme" unless you read it unnaturally. This is obviously true. But you're not meant to force it to fit. The first lines of the poem -- as you rightly note and as is often true -- establish the metre of the piece and it is on that basis that the poet can then vary the rhythm for effect. Line 9 diverges farthest but few of the lines are perfect iambic pentameters after the first -- most are not perfectly iambic and/or do not have five stresses. As is very common in English poetry throughout its history, whatever the textbooks say, the line often slips towards 4 rather than 5 -- e.g. I'd say like GINGer BIScuits on a TABle CLOTH (capitals = stresses). It would be very artificial to stress ON here. In line 9 three stresses are clustered at the end of the line -- I think most people would probably say JUDGED her RUN-up to some COOLing COW SHIT, so we have the little patter of the run-up itself in that series of unstressed syllables in the middle of the line and then the witty emphasis (anticipating the landing) falling upon those very Anglo-Saxon monosyllables at the end, which in terms of diction -- the register and the association of the word -- as well as sound are a departure in the poem. Duhig is sensitive here to syllable quantity as well as stress -- features which often but do not always align in English. (By quantity I mean how long the sounds take to pronounce: I am trying to gloss in this reply any terms that might not be clear to everyone -- not because I don't think you personally won't understand them, but because I know I have quite a few non-native-English speaker readers who might be following the debate in these comments.)
I don't want to give the impression that I only like or appreciate formal poetry, which is very far from the truth. (And indeed, the poetry I write myself takes a whole range of forms.) I do think poetry should be written to be heard -- so in that sense should have some kind of musicality -- but that can take many shapes, and many of my favourite poets write free verse. (In fact, I've worked quite a bit on free verse in Latin, which is a niche poetic interest if ever there was one.) My disappointment with Allen-Paisant is not that his poetry is unmusical but more that its musicality does not seem entirely under his control: it feels under-revised and undigested. This links I think to other elements of the collection -- that there's quite a lot of repetition and redundancy, and some outright cliché. These could all be intentional choices, of course, but I didn't feel convinced that they were; or that, if they were, they were artistically successful.
Duhig’s humor kind of wins me over. Looking at some of the poems on the Only Poems site, I’m reminded of how essential humor is to many poets. I also like just about any poem that integrates quotes or dialogue into the metrical scheme, as Stallings does in her own sonnet-like poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56231/the-rosehead-nail
(And note that V. Penelope is in the same issue.)
And yes, I think we’re meant to hear the initial punch of “judged” and “guessed” as a variation from the other lines where the verb tends to begin at the second or fourth syllable — this is the winding up of the spring that’s released in line 11.
Hi Victoria -- thanks for this response, and especially for going into more detail about what you value in Duhig's work. I have one collection of his that I haven't revisited in a while -- my memory of it is that, as in this short extract, I found the structuring of the poems to be slightly too reliant on slippage to be technically impressive (where a poet like W.N. Herbert, Glyn Maxwell or Tony Harrison tends to really stick to the form) and, more crucially, that it jarred with the tone or register of the poem to the point where I found it a little awkward to read.
For instance, you're right that I would read that line normally as "JUDGED her RUN-up to some COOLing COW SHIT", and the only reason I say it doesn't fit the meter established in the first two lines is that, once a meter is established, I will try to make the rest of the poem fit that meter as I read it, as if it were a drumbeat going on in the background. When a beat is missed, I expect it to emphasise something -- recently, for instance, I marked a student's poem where the change in metrical pattern part way through comes at a point in the poem's narrative where things are becoming more frantic and loose. In this poem, though, the variation just seems random -- the beat stops being regular, as if the drummer were distracted. I struggle against the impression that the poet has just given up for the sake of convenience at line 3, then settles again into a regular meter at line 5, only to lose it again part way through line 8.
I can follow what you say about the almost-'splatter' of the words COW SHIT being placed where they are, and I think I would have detected it myself if that had been a more singular anomaly.
I find the imagery similarly haphazard -- mostly it works, but fields as some variation of white sheets is kind of a cliche, and I can't make footprints in the snow marry up with any memory I have of ginger biscuits on a tablecloth. I find myself picturing something closer to the pattern of holes in a lace tablecloth.
In terms of tone and subject matter, I can't find anything to criticise but it also feels fairly unremarkable in the present landscape of poetry, where there are (quite rightly) a great many poems that focus on everyday minor joys and sillinesses. All of this is not to express any particular misgivings with Duhig, but just to emphasise again that I find it hard to agree in this instance (and as is the case in almost every instance) that there is a gulf of technical ability between the two poets.
In fact, this experience has become so commonplace for me that my conclusion at the moment is that comparative assessment of technical ability -- as if it were something one could measure, like weight or muscle strength -- is a critical dead end. That's not to say that technical ability is non-existent, but that it isn't all happening according to any consistent set of standards or expectations, and so when we look at Allen-Paisant's work we have to talk about what *is* there and what it's doing, rather than what we think ought to be there.