Pluralism versus Selectivity

Buried beneath the chalk-dry tone of this William Wootten article in the TLS, there's fighting talk. Wootten compares Alverez' The New Poetry to the recent Identity Parade and Salt Book of Younger Poets (both edited by Roddy Lumsden) and finds "a colossal failure of nerve" in Lumsden's choice to pack out both books with a broad spread of poets, rather than choose a dozen or so and make the case for them being the front-runners of their generation. The problem with such plurality, he seems to be saying, is that the reader is left with an overcrowded buffet to choose from, with far too much on offer for any sensible debate to begin. The success of poetry in the 1960s, when the Alverez anthology was published, was partly, he writes, due to "the fostering of strong and discriminating tastes and dispositions ... It was they who gave reasons why contemporary poetry might actually matter."

A few remarks on that argument. First of all, the metaphor of the man walking down the middle of the road comes to mind. Identity Parade in particular, alongside The Best British Poetry 2011 (also Lumsden-edited) has more than once been lambasted for having included the wrong poets and passed over others whose inclusion in any generational anthology should be a given. Wootten need not be worried that Lumsden's tastes don't offend anyone, or that he fails to be selective.

Moreover, a representative sample has to be representative. The size of the sample in relation to the population matters. If an editor or publisher is to in any way carry off the claim that their book is a generational anthology, even tentatively, it has to convince its readers that it covers a fair bit of the ground.

I don't think this is actually possible with British poetry today, except by means of the mega-anthology. Sure, you could select your 20 or so luminaries and write a fiercely combative introduction that puts them at the centre of everything that's happening, but no sensible person would waste time entertaining the thought that you were right. They might read your book, and they might even say you've articulated your views forcefully, but unless there were some reason they were in your thrall, and in your thrall alone, they would then re-subject themselves to the vast arena of poetry beyond your wagon-circle and never find themselves thinking: "But how would I refute x's case for those 20?"

Wootten's romanticised 'moment' where "contemporary poetry and its values were treated as a singular artistic arena whose various styles and champions could be debated, intelligently and passionately if not always in ways capable of clear resolution" certainly sounds attractive. But is that what we'd get if publishers started putting out anthologies defined by their editors' deeply entrenched positions? I really, really doubt it. We aren't anywhere near ready for it. For there to be healthy debate, there has to be a well of common understanding, a shared sense of the starting point and of the stakes. We don't have that. We have such a spectrum of expertise, individualism and ignorance when it comes to poetry that you're more likely to have a conversation where neither of you has heard of the poets the other wants to namecheck than you are one where two champions of disparate styles can cross swords. And I mean 'we' here both in the sense of the general public and literary types, both of whom I know equally well (ie. not very well at all).

Maybe if I put it like this then: Wootten is asking for work to commence on the penthouse while Lumsden is still embroiled in the effort of firming the foundations. We need to draw everyone together on the same footing before we can have the grand debates. In some sense, yes, that is a backwards step for poetic culture, but only because the poetic culture of the past was at all times dominated by the upper echelons of society. Wootten is living in a sort of a dream world where a wild and boisterous declaration of poetic/editorial intent can stir or boil the blood of the average reader, rather than merely carry the faint whiff of trying too hard.

The article also includes the oft-used phrase "competent but unexceptional poets", which is usually a shorthand for a general complaint that there aren't enough poets on high pedestals, who can be seen for miles around. No one's ever made a great case for why we need these pedestalled poets, and no one has, to my knowledge, made a strong case for any poet of the modern era deserving this position, and that's why we are where we are now. But I don't entirely dislike where we are now.

School of Forgery

School of Forgery, by yours truly, is out now and available to buy. It's published by Salt, and is the culmination of my last - oh, I don't know - four or five years of writing activity. But it doesn't just hoover up my various outpourings and stuff them into one handsome hard-cover; it's a book with its own identity, structure and unhealthy preoccupations. Anything which didn't fit has been left over for later. Essentially, the major theme is the relationship between invention and fakery, or falseness, and there's a huge influence of Japanese subculture on the various poems. The contents are divided into 'Originals' and 'Fakes'. There are pieces inspired by, about, screwing with or riffing on Seven Samurai, The Avengers (that's the British version), Bleach, Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, mustard, Nell Gwynn, plastic surgery, octopuses, ginger, witches' familiars, Battle of the Planets, Tom Jones, MI6, Celan and more besides.

It's a Poetry Book Society summer recommendation, and if there's one couplet in the book that describes the whole affair, I'd say it's this:

And some of it will be intelligence.
And some of it you'll think makes too much sense.

The best (ie. most ethical) place to buy it is from Salt's website. It's available from Amazon as well, but Salt are a small publisher for whom every sale counts, and more money goes to them if you buy straight from them. Plus they'll probably get it to you much faster.

News of a joint launch with fellow Salt poet John Clegg to follow.

Submissions deadline for Fuselit 18: Amazon

The final deadline for submissions to Fuselit 18: Amazon, previously unset, is now 30th April. After this, Fuselit will be on a submissions holiday until September, when we will open up for submissions for issue 19 (spur-word to be announced).

Poetry and Tribalism (Mirror post!)

'Tribalism' is, of course, a negative term, a word we use to criticise. We scorn it, want to be done with it, and yet it seems to perfectly describe a kind of attitude that few human beings avoid entirely. We identify ourselves as being part of a certain group, and round others up, usually without their permission, into contrasting groups which we define ourselves against. It afflicts British poetry culture, at least to an extent I see played out in various public and private interactions, and it could do, I think, with some objective analysis, as well as further discussion.

The three main tribes I'm referring to are: the mainstream, the spoken word scene (alternatively, performance poetry, slam or stand-up poetry) and the avant-garde (alternatively, non-mainstream or innovative poetry). Some of these terms are hotly debated, rejected or modified for clarity, but in order to get on with an article like this, I simply have to use them loosely. Via Facebook, internet forums, articles and pub conversations, I've experienced various discussions of the differences or lack thereof between the three, but these discussions tend to take place between like-minded people. I rarely see a proponent of the avant-garde square off against a regular from London's spoken word scene, for example. If parts of this post therefore seem to labour a screamingly obvious point, it's because I am addressing myself to myriad different viewpoints which, to my mind, seldom agree on what is and is not obvious.

So I'm going to try to pull some threads together. First of all, let's consider some positive (and crude) generalisations, just to get our bearings:

• The spoken word scene is grass roots poetry, increasingly popular and well-attended, priding itself on being inclusive, non-elitist and politically engaged. Spoken-word artists eschew obscurity to address topics directly and passionately through stage performance and are active in overturning the popular image of poetry as fusty and self-obsessed. The scene has its roots in the centuries-old traditions of tavern performance and oral storytelling.
• Avant-garde poetry emphasises radical thinking, playfulness and the critical importance of language. Its principle belief is that powerful institutions and the outdated ideals that sustain them can only be challenged by revolutionising and reenergising language itself, by undermining and overturning the registers and modes of exchange that reinforce current orthodoxies. It embraces feminism and minority poetics and seeks to dispel myths about poetry that limit its scope and reach, including the idea that poems should be understood merely as self-expression or versified narratives.
• 'Mainstream' poetry is not so much a scene or movement as it is a catch-all term for the most widely acclaimed poets of all stripes, as well as the numerous others whose work bears a familial resemblance to these 'leaders in the field'. Its style is defined only by whatever is popular and enduring, and shifts over time. If there is a modus operandi at all, it is one of inclusivity through emphasis on the individual poetic 'voice', rather than any particular style or school of thought. Good mainstream poetry avoids both elitism and populism, attempting to meet readers half way, the idea being that good poetry needs to be challenging but also that poets must make every effort to engage their audience.

All three tend to give primacy to reader pleasure, but the latter two tend (to differing extents) to anticipate or require a certain hunger or adventurousness from the reader.

Now let's look at the harsher negative stereotypes of each which are sometimes bandied about:

• Spoken word is the domain of aspiring comedians, hip-hop artists and rabble-rousers who like a more pliant audience, shoehorning jokes and tirades into the loosest of verse structures. It's the medium of choice for those who make little effort to refine their poetic craft and lack the patience for poetry's more subtle effects, making much of the output derivative and rambling.
• Avant-garde poetry, despite its pretensions, is dominated by middle class white academics who have failed to break into the mainstream and now disingenuously associate incomprehensibility and opaqueness in poetry with daring and cleverness. The literary equivalent of Brit Art, it's Emperor's New Clothes syndrome writ large; endless pontificating on random assemblages of text using plenty of jargon in order to prove you're part of the club.
• Mainstream poetry is a small enclave of largely white, upper middle class men who live comfortably enough to obsess mostly over trivial things and ignore most politics, look down on popular culture and compete for status in a classical canon, taking care to avoid offending too many sensibilities or challenging too many orthodoxies. Because of their (unearned) power and prestige, they are in a position to pick and choose the next generation of 'mainstream' poets from those whose beliefs and writing styles flatter their own, and, of course, from the creative writing courses they run.

There is at least a kernel of truth in all of these descriptions. There's also much in the latter three that is informed by snobbery in its various forms, and by the problem of accessibility/simplicity versus difficulty/obscurity in art, which seems to result in deeply entrenched positions. I'd like to think most people agree that both difficult and accessible writing can be democratic and a force for good, and that each can respectively feel pointlessly obtuse or artless if handled poorly. The debate that rages seems to be about where we can draw the lines, although the most heated remarks are often so hopelessly broad-brush that the debate never really gets going.

It's very likely that there are poets operating in each of the three spheres I identify who feel they are there because the other two won't have them, or because they believe their own particular scene grants them access to the widest and most diverse audience. That experience is highly subjective though. Most poets looking to carve out an audience will undergo a process of gradual refinement, improvement and compromise that finds them gravitating towards one or the other, depending on how their personal judgement evolves.

As an example, my own work fits mostly in the mainstream bracket, and it's likely that I've consciously made an effort to reconcile my ambitions to the dominant forms and aesthetics in that area. But I've also attempted to find my footing in some spoken word arenas, and a portion of my work has always seemed to be more in keeping with avant-garde fashions (albeit I don't see it as being in any way out of step with my other poems). This has led to me to some vexing and seemingly nonsensical considerations: this old sestina that guarantees a laugh when read aloud, should I discard it utterly or keep it around as a surefire crowd-pleaser? How many collage poems do I dare slip into a submission for a mainstream poetry magazine? Which poems from my pamphlet can I safely perform without being dismissed as a dull page poet?

Coming out of this, my own subjective experience is that the spoken word scene is the most difficult to engage with. I've found that it demands a kind of force of personality that I don't have and don't want to have, and that my tastes are generally out of kilter with most of the audience. The world of avant-garde seems to line up more with the kind of work I want to write, but also seems to demand a degree of familiarity with certain niche poetics and a strong academic leaning, neither of which I possess. Therefore, for me, the mainstream has probably offered the shortest distance to travel in order to find the right fit, as far as I can find the right fit anywhere.

But that's, as I say, simply my own experience. I don't believe the case has been proven that any one of these three is fundamentally more embracing of all styles and approaches than the others. People being people, the process of becoming included, of working out where you fit in, requires a negotiation that challenges and tempers some egos while inflaming others (particularly where the 'fit' is near instantaneous). People being people, those most comfortable and most settled in their space can become arrogant and lazy. Arguably, this is most achingly obvious in the mainstream world, because of its relative apportionment of status and power. The same names are recycled by prize committees and editors stricken with nearly identical preferences. We don't need to believe the rumours of flagrant nepotism; flawed human nature is explanation enough. Without an unaffiliated, independent critical culture or scrutiny from an external source (in other words, without constant prodding, nit-picking, niggling and badgering) people of influence settle into a clan-like arrangement. Hence Ted Hughes Prize winner Lavinia Greenlaw tellingly remarking that the shortlist she was on looked like "a family photo" last month. The belief that, say, that Sean O'Brien or Robin Robertson has produced yet another outstanding collection is genuine and uncynical - it's simply based on a lack of consistent exposure to contrary views and tastes, and susceptibility to the 'aura' of a poet who has made their name.

It's worth noting, though, that the spoken word and avant-garde scenes suffer from the same human fallibilities, albeit theirs are less visible and (because they do not have access to the same resources) less disagreeable. "Avantpo criticism," as one poet describes it on Facebook, "is somewhere between an echo-chamber and a circlejerk", and when one starts drawing lines between poets based on book endorsements, namechecks in essays, guest editorships of underground magazines and the like, the web of affiliations quickly becomes apparent. Similarly, many spoken word nights feature a carousel of familiar names, something particularly notable when performances are televised or otherwise of a higher profile.

Conversely, it seems at first glance like all the rancour is directed towards the mainstream from the two 'outskirter' tribes. You almost feel sorry for mainstream poetry when you see it described, on the one hand, as needlessly complex and unintelligible by some spoken word advocates, and on the other dismissed as "the simple plundering of domesticated interiority for its symbolic potential" in a letter to the Cambridge Review. It seems to catch the brunt simply for being in the middle. Only Don Paterson hits back, and then only in the direction of the avant-garde, branding it "that peculiar and persistent brand of late romantic expressionism, almost always involving the deliberate or inept foregrounding of form and strategy over content - almost in a proud demonstration of their anti-naturalism".

But from a position of privilege, the persistent foregrounding of mainstream poets in broadsheets and government-funded bodies is counter-aggression enough, particularly when you have Carol Ann Duffy making remarks like "there's little competitiveness in the poetry world", self-evidently reducing 'the poetry world' to the mainstream only. Niall O'Sullivan, host of Poetry Unplugged, is judicious in remarking that he bears no ill will towards the mainstream prize circuit "as long as those involved don’t utter the usual lines about how they honestly tried to simply choose the best collection". But they do, and this is a problem.

The antipathy, therefore, is roughly constant across the three tribes. So, I would say, is the propensity for a lack of objectivity. And is there roughly equal potential for strong and innovative poetry in each? I would say there is. Is there roughly equal likelihood of tiredness and mediocrity being mistaken for consistency? Yes. Are there always overrated poets? Absolutely. Sean O'Brien, Keston Sutherland and Kate Tempest, respectively, are not so far in front of the bulk of their contemporaries as their reputations suggest.

There is one distinction that is worth deeper consideration, though, and which may reveal a fundamental cause (or reinforcer, at least) of the tribalistic attitudes. While mainstream poetry undoubtedly revolves around a system of meritocracy, ostensibly rewarding poets proportionately to their work's value, both the spoken word and avant garde scenes seem to operate more in the spirit of a collective, where active and frequent participation puts you on the same level as most of your peers. In terms of organisation structure, it's like comparing a pyramid to an even plain with the odd spike. I've picked up this impression from various sources, but just to give a couple of recent examples, this interview in The Morning Star describes the moment a first-time reader is announced at Poetry Unplugged:

"... the host hollers: 'Next up, a Poetry Unplugged virgin!' and a roar of approval spreads throughout the intimate audience, a cheer louder than anyone would rightfully expect to emanate from 50 people." 

In the case of the avant-garde, this article by Alec Newman (editor of Knives, Forks and Spoons Press) in the Cordite review paints a picture of publishers that "cooperate in the dissemination of our titles [...] share our experiences, our strengths & our resources, and [...] quite often publish the same poets in the same month in order to bring them to the widest possible audience."

That's not to say there aren't aspects of meritocracy alive and well in the imaginations of both avant-garde and spoken word artists. Avant-gardists in particular seem at times to propose an alternative narrative of recent poetic history that is just as figurehead-heavy as the mainstream's, while spoken word is prone to the populist argument: whosoever draws the biggest crowd is the most deserving (in this sense, populism is just the other side of the coin to elitism; both entertain a kind of artistic social Darwinism, whereby the desired outcome is that the very few are raised onto pedestals for mass dissemination and the rest fall away, even if that ultimately restricts choice and opportunity).

But the mainstream, for the most part, lacks the counterbalance of a collective spirit. Poets are gracious and generous, but there is an expectation that beginners must start at the bottom of a long ladder and spend a long time fruitlessly clambering. There is expectation also of reverence toward those higher up the food chain than you (not to mention argy-bargy when it comes to the exact order of that food chain), and a deal of agitation about the 'excessive' amount of poetry being written. Here's Hugo Williams, on judging the Forward Prize in 2010:

"But an awful lot of them seemed to be published just because they existed, really. [147 collections is] too big a number of books in one year in one country to put out. I think it's something to do with the democratisation of everything – that everyone's got a right to get a book out ... I've got the feeling that sometimes it's more about desire than worth."

When we ask ourselves why British poetic culture isn't a continuum of styles, but seems to be regarded in terms of these three reductive pigeon-holes, it's perhaps this difference of approach that gives us the answer. The mainstream, which is at the centre, is not porous enough. Poets from either end of the spectrum do not drift into or through it in a way that would completely disrupt any attempt to differentiate and stigmatise.

Do I think the mainstream needs to lose its meritocratic attitudes then? Partly, but not entirely. An absolute lack of selectivity across the board would do more harm than good. It's been expressed to me that a serious problem among avant-gardists is that if you have the right attitude, the right chops, you're in, and there's no further editing of your poems or demands made of you as a writer. Discussion and debate about the relative merits of art and artists in any medium seems to me not just a healthy but an essential thing, but when it comes to a poem like Hot White Andy by Keston Sutherland, lauded by some as one of the best poems of the 21st century, I've read much intelligent analysis but nothing that even attempts to explain what it does that other, comparatively similar-looking texts do not. All poetry suffers from the problem of seeming to be, at first idle glance, indistinct and samey, which is why articulating distinctive qualities and features is essential. This articulation begins in blurbs and cover quotes and memorable remarks, and includes reviews and essays. One of the great flaws in our poetic culture, across the whole spectrum, is that it tends towards addressing inner circles and the converted, rather than attempting the more onerous task of engaging the sceptic. The avant-garde, on present evaluation, suffers even more heavily from this affliction, and the spoken word scene is almost totally lacking in written analysis, outside of the odd site like Sabotage Reviews.

This aspect of mainstream poetry's self-coverage, then, is one I find flawed but crucially important to any healthy poetic culture.

I also think the collective spirit can be over-emphasised to the extent that it becomes less, not more democratic. I had a brief exchange with Niall O'Sullivan on this in the comments section of the post I previously linked to where he usefully described the conflict between the inclusivity of folk cultures and the capitalist/corporate encouragement of solipsistic individualism:

"Mainstream poetry is all about the audience as a passive receiver, especially to the point where the poet often instructs the audience not to applaud until the very end. Inclusive tropes and turns of phrase are dismissed as cliche. 

"Originality and individualism are as much a part of capitalism and consumerism as they are a part of mainstream poetry and this is why I’m not that surprised to find a lack of engagement with the current social movements within it. It channels the university lecture where a few short questions are allowed at the end rather than the boisterous trade union gathering or the revivalist church service."

I partly agree with Niall here, but I also want to defend the university lecture model as an alternative and necessary means of including as many people as possible in progressive discourse. Popular rhetoric is simultaneously empowering and alienating. Many people exercise their social conscience by behaving sceptically towards mass sentiment and fashionable anti-establishment feeling, preferring to reach their own conclusions and to not to be grouped together with others whose views are broadly similar but not quite the same. Although there are toxic kinds of individualism, finding one's own way is also a kind of empowerment, one that is more familiar to many of us than the process of becoming part of a popular movement.

Without getting too sidetracked, the point here is simple: everyone arguing or conversing with each other in an unstructured way can lead to the most simplistic arguments and loudest voices being foregrounded. Affording a temporary elevated status to a poet (or lecturer), as the person addressing an audience, who are there to listen is, in theory at least, a recognition of the time and care they have put into what they are reciting - by definition more time and care than can be put into an immediate reaction. This permits a greater wealth of nuanced and intelligent viewpoints to be shared.

Let me try to further break this down: there is an irreconcilable disagreement, as I see it, between those who say, "If anyone can be a poet or writer indiscriminately, then it all becomes worthless - only a few will ever be worth listening to" and those who argue that any amount of selectivity is non-democratic and necessarily endorsing of the current regime (ie. those at the top of any social order will oppose change). There has to be a path between those extremes which aims to justly reward any artist who is willing to commit, continually improve, and not avoid their social responsibilities. Mainstream poetry does not achieve this - it is too married to a certain family of styles, too non-fluid to recognise its own deficiencies - but some of the framework is there, and it's a framework that needs to be preserved and built upon.

What this all comes down to is, you might think, rather bland: all three 'tribes' I have identified are important to British poetic culture and ideally should form a continuous, non-staggered spectrum. There is far too much of a tendency towards dismissiveness across the board, and too little effort made to properly recognise the merits of one another. Our collective responsibility, I think, is to change the mainstream without destroying it - or worse, replacing it with something similarly flawed.

Adventures in Form out now!

Excited to announce that the ever-curious Penned in the Margins has just released this handsome delight, the PBS-commended Adventures in Form. Jon and I were lucky enough to be included in this tribute to constraint, which features a wide range of forms, from the classical to the very recently invented. Out to prove that there is life in form beyond the Petrarchan sonnet, Aventures in Form celebrates play, challenge and the strange and often beautiful results that issue forth from the poetic lab. Get your copy pronto.

Fighting the programming: self-confidence and equal achievement

In college, a friend conducting a survey for her A level Psychology class asked a range of girls to name a strong female role model. When she came to me, I hadn't got a clue. Finally I came up with Anita Roddick. Not because she had particularly influenced me, but because it was acknowledged that she was a Strong Female Role Model.

"Anita Roddick," sighed my friend. "Everyone seems to say her."

So we come to another International Women's Day, and the release of further depressing studies showing that women still make up only 13.7% of the boards of top European companies. According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, 59% of European university graduates are women, but 82% of the continent's full university professors are men.

Of course, we're way beyond the days women being written off as less intelligent. Perhaps the answer lies in studies such as Stereotype susceptibility in children: effects of identity activation on quantitative performance (Ambady, Shih, Kim, & Pittinsky, 2001), which showed that girls performed worse in traditionally male-dominated subjects, such as maths, when their gender had been highlighted beforehand.

If others give up hope on you and saddle you with lowered expectations, however baseless their reasons, it makes it doubly hard not to give up on yourself. If we really want to normalise the idea of women, or any under-represented group, in positions of power, authority and respect, we need to start by fostering the self-confidence that enables women to believe their gender isn't the deciding factor.

Take the oft-lamented pay gap. It's just sort of accepted, really. Women are paid less than men for the same work. A recent European Parliament feature explained that women have had to work until 2 March 2012 to catch up to the amount earned by their male counterparts as of 31 December 2011. Sucks, doesn't it?

Since it's illegal to overtly offer more money to a male candidate than a female one, what's actually happening to maintain this disparity? I suspect, although some pay-bartering is perhaps done through old networks or rapport, a sizeable part of the problem is that women don't feel as comfortable asking for the salary they believe they are worth as men do. Or perhaps they're not confident enough that they are worth that salary; they just feel a vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, but don't want to rock the boat, for fear of judgements based on their sex.

I've been wondering recently whether there is in fact a critical period for the development of self-confidence, the results of which travel with children into adulthood, greatly affecting their self-perception. As someone who experienced bullying in quite a few arenas in childhood, it's only been very recently that professional and personal discussions have thrown up exactly how these early experiences have knocked my willingness to take risks, value my own work or try new things. The last time I was invited to put forward a statement as to why I should be given a pay rise at work, I didn't even bother. I felt too exposed, as if I were setting myself up for failure.

The intense scrutiny I felt I was under may have been, in part, my imagination. But when girls grow up being told that doctors are men and nurses are women, or that fluffy, bland programmes like the 1980s version of My Little Pony (the new series is going some way to making things right), or Care Bears are their programmes, and the exciting, proactive shows about winning battles and inventing things are only for the boys (leaving aside the problematic Smurfette principle), I wonder if the message of acceptance, meekness and passivity gets welded to gender identity in the long-term. Let the boys do all the challenging, dangerous tasks - we've got hair to plait! Of course it's not the fault of cartoons, but a general gassing with perfume that has the potential to negatively affect womens' self-esteem.

On top of this, there are those areas of industry that thrive on relentlessly undermining women's confidence. They have a knack for it. The beauty industry is the obvious one - a facehugger targeting younger and younger females with a slow-acting poison - but there are many other businesses heavily invested in sucking women's money, time, energy and security dry, hence their social and economic power. Today I walked past a sign in a salon for Hair Botox. Hair Botox - where does it stop?

Say a woman does make it onto the board of a company. She will almost always be in the minority, and so will stand out. She unwittingly becomes a representative for 'women'. Any criticisms of her way of working are all too easily attributed to her sex. Is it surprising that few women consider this career step? The gut reaction to outspoken women and girls by many male commentators is to resort to gender-based insults and threats. This is particularly noticeable in internet commentary. Are online forums really such a world away from the macho environment of big business?

When I was small, I didn't shy away from the dream of becoming a pilot or a mathematics professor or a free-runner or an MD at any point because I consciously filed them under 'for boys'. They were simply never suggested to me. It never occurred to me that women could be doctors. Growing up, I recognised that, logically, of course they could, but it still felt unusual and somewhat of a novelty to see a female in such a role. I'm concerned that, just as with age we lose the ability to naturally absorb new languages, so too do we lose a degree of openness, and the ability not just to consider new possibilities, but to believe in them. If we want to normalise women making global business and political decisions, women creating and curating, broadening views everywhere, women conducting ground-breaking research and saving lives, we need to start spreading the message to young children that they can achieve anything. And don't just tell the girls: tell everyone.

Happy International Women's Day everybody!

Guest Blogger: Sebastian Manley on 'The Birds'

 

Like many people, I love The Birds (1963), Hitchcock’s tale of love troubled by dark forces in sunny California. And it’s a film I’ve been thinking about recently, partly in response to the various bird images and poems that have been circulating the Sidekick Books command centre ahead of the publication of Birdbook: Freshwater Habitats, volume two of Kirsty and Jon’s planned series celebrating the bird inhabitants of Great Britain. What I’ve been thinking about in particular is the relationship between the birds and the people that the film depicts and what we might make of it, particularly if we are interested in the relationship between animals and people in real life. Is it right to say, for example, as many critics have said, that the birds are there to express something significant and meaningful about the human characters or their relationships? Is there something else that they are there to do? Or is it possible to see the film as being in some way ‘about’ birds and our relationship with them?

            The Birds is a frightening and shocking film in some respects – I can’t imagine many viewers forget the image of Dan Fawcett with his eyes pecked out – but it is also a self-consciously arty one, amply supplied with enigmatic compositions and Freudian banter and committed to a fairly radical form of narrative in which strange phenomena remain unexplained and the protagonists’ fate still hangs in the balance when the screen fades to black for the final time (Hitchcock had arranged to watch European art films by Antonioni, Bergman and others before making The Birds, and a number of his ideas for the film were a good deal stranger than his scriptwriter, Evan Hunter, was comfortable with). In its general ambiguity the film does seem to encourage some sort of metaphorical reading, in which the birds symbolise particular human emotions or desires. The critic Margaret Horowitz argues, for example, that the birds are an Oedipal symbol: a manifestation of Lydia’s wish to prevent her son becoming involved with another woman. Camille Paglia sees the film in similar terms, the horrific attacks in her reading representing ‘a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite’.

            The philosopher Robert Yanal is not sure about all this psychoanalytical stuff, which in his view raises more questions than it answers (why would Lydia’s jealousy strike at her friend Dan Fawcett? why should the attacks get worse once Lydia and Melanie have started to bond?). Yanal’s alternative reading is that the birds express nothing specific about the emotional relationships between the main characters but are instead simply scary monsters made scarier by their ultimate inexplicability – an unsettling narrative truth that is, for Yanal, a far more plausible ‘subject’ of the film than the characters and their underdeveloped relationships. So maybe the film is in fact about the unknowable, and maybe – this is me speculating now – it plays on the slight apprehension with which we regard birds, perhaps the least easily anthropomorphised and most enigmatic of the vertebrate species with which we share our various habitats (I think it’s also possible that these are qualities that make birds appealing subjects for poets and other artists, but see the introduction to Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens and Woodland for some other suggestions).

            But the film also seems to suggest, to an extent, that the attacks are a kind of retribution, a vengeful strike by the bird species at its human exploiters or oppressors. Like another animal horror film, Jaws: The Revenge (1987), whose first post-credit shot is a close-up of the eye of a fish being cheerfully fried by the protagonist, The Birds includes an early scene that features animals being ‘used’ by humans. Long before we see birds attacking anyone, we see birds in cages, at the pet shop where Melanie and Mitch first meet. ‘Doesn’t this make you feel awful?’ asks Mitch, ‘Having all these innocent little creatures caged up like this?’ (he is pretending at this point to think that Melanie is a salesperson). In the later scene in the Tides restaurant, an amateur ornithologist, Mrs Bundy, offers a sceptical response to the reports of bird attacks, asserting that birds are not aggressive creatures. She then starts to make a point about the aggressiveness of humankind, but she is cut off by the waitress’s call for an order of fried chicken (that is, a bird killed by a human) – a kind of coincidental illustration of Bundy’s point that seems to be served up by the film itself and that leaves us with the feeling that, at the very least, the birds have got cause to feel aggrieved.

Avenging animals? The birds attack Melanie and the schoolchildren.

            Dialogue drawing attention to humans’ mistreatment of birds is more common in the final-draft version of the script, which includes a bit where Melanie argues that the birds are attacking because they’re protecting the species (‘Maybe they’re tired of being shot at and roasted in ovens and ...’) and an exchange between Mitch and Melanie in which they half-jokingly imagine the bird attacks to be part of a bird ‘uprising’ led by a kind of sparrow Marx fighting for an end to humans’ dominion over birdkind (see here). But there is a similar flavour to some of the materials that did get a public release, including a radio announcement that ran: ‘If you have ever eaten a turkey drumstick, caged a canary or gone duck hunting, The Birds will give you something to think about.’ Hitch himself, in a similar vein, described the film as a parable warning us not to take nature for granted (1).

This sort of analysis, I think, is likely to look a little out of place in the literature on Hitchcock’s work, which in keeping with cultural studies writing in general has tended to see fictional animals as metaphors rather than as things that might have some connection to real animals in the real world. Of course, one of the features of The Birds is that the birds don’t act like the birds we know – what kind of horror film would it be where they did? – and I wouldn’t want to suggest that films should always strive to capture the reality of animal behaviour or identity. But one important part of reality is the relationship we have with other animals, and that seems like a good thing for artists and critics to spend some time thinking about now and again.  

1. See Paglia’s book The Birds for more on the radio announcement and on Hitchcock’s interpretation of the film.

Works referenced

Horowitz, Margaret, ‘The Birds: A Mother’s Love’, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds.), The Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986).

Irving, Kirsten, and Jon Stone (eds.), Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens and Woodland (London: Sidekick Books, 2011).

Irving, Kirsten, and Jon Stone (eds.), Birdbook: Freshwater Habitats (London: Sidekick Books, forthcoming).

Paglia, Camille, The Birds (London: BFI, 1998).

Yanal, Robert J., Hitchcock as Philosopher (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2005).

~

I maintain a blog on animals in film at http://cinematicanimal.wordpress.com/

Submission Accomplished!

Check out Submission Accomplished, an article K's written for the fantastic Young Poets Network on submitting to magazines. Comments appreciated!

Tickets please! Fuselit: Contraption is out at last!

After a long, long time under tarpaulin, attended by sinister figures in black, we unleash upon you, the public, not only a gorgeous new website, courtesy of Jon's tireless graftery, but also Fuselit's 17th issue, Contraption!



Available to read online, or as a free (or pay-what-you-want-if-you-like) download for your Kindle or e-book reader, as well as in its traditional paper/card/ribbon/unicorn toenail hand-made format, it's a modern marvel!

Head to www.fuselit.co.uk for a closer inspection.

Imminent Activity

New Fuselit website will be up in the next couple of days, with Contraption ready to buy.

The Boar reviews 'Confronting the Danger of Art'

Award-winning university newspaper The Boar has reviewed Ian McLachlan and Phil Cooper's 'Confronting the Danger of Art' thus:

"Imagine a world in which artistic expression is suppressed and condemned by the government. Not too difficult, is it, considering the cuts we have suffered in recent years. Both wonderfully relevant therefore and also intriguing in its portrayal of the thing is Ian McLachlan's 'Confronting The Danger Of Art', a short poetry pamphlet that talks about how to survive an influx of creative types and their work in the style of a 70s nuclear safety information booklet. It is a marriage of ideas that does not sound quite as effective as it actually is; the poetry within providing a hilarious and searing look at the way people do sometimes treat the arts, and how it is a slippery slope potentially towards more totalitarian views ... perfectly crafted and delightfully witty."

Buy 'Confronting the Danger of Art' here, and make an old alchemist marginally wealthier.

Various logos

Wait, I'm not a graphic designer. How did I end up having to do this much work just for some crummy logos for various arms of Sidekick?

Fuselit/Sidekick Books Selected Poems at the V&A

Much like St Gundebert, we're very much looking forward to 21 February. Unlike St Gundebert, we don't get an entire day dedicated to our work, and nobody, to my knowledge, prays to us on a regular basis.

So why are we stoked? Fuselit and Sidekick Books, in collaboration with Selected Poems, are all set for a night of poetry-based frolics to launch Fuselit Contraption and celebrate our ramshackle brand of collaborative poetry!





As well as Jon and K, Dr Fulminare's ambassadors for the night will be:
•the winsome and whimsical Chrissy Williams, whose collection, The Jam Trap, is due in March from Soaring Penguin;
•Department for Public Safety spokespoet and co-author of the recently released report, Confronting the Danger of Art, Ian McLachlan;
•schmoove raconteuse and crafter of poetic contraptions, Sophia Blackwell;
•Fuselit and Birdbook formal firestarter, M.P. Dean.

Come down and say hello!

Facebook event here. Past events have hit capacity, so get in quick.
Follow Selected Poems on Twitter.

A week at the flicks

Hello! I hope you're well. Sorry I haven't seen much of you this week, but I have been to the cinema twice. Watching films at the cinema costs skywards of £12 these days, so I'm going to effing and jeffing well write about them.

Coriolanus. Peculiar film, but that's OK as it's a strange play full of the kind of strange lines that have you going "Really, Shakespeare? Really? There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger?" It's not exactly a play about making a balls-up of getting your message across. It's more a play about having something to get across that isn't a message.

That said, as a film it's still odder than it needs to be. Normally the advantage of screen over stage is being able to use more than a dozen people to represent the entire population of Rome. Not here. Here the entire population of Rome meets for tea in each other's flats. In the Jeremy Kyle banishment scene they even jeer in single file, and when Ralph Fiennes is having his Arthur-stealing-the-Christmas-Club-money flip-out, they don't muster a titter between them. Rome feels like England when there's a moderate kerfuffle, but reverts to Serbia when it really kicks off. After Coriolanus and Aufidius have been peeled off each other in Corioles, Gerard Butler wanders over to a car full of corpses to open the Tupperware lunchbox that contains his monologue, and suddenly you're watching the classiest but ugliest episode of Rab C Nesbitt you'll ever see.

James (C?) Nesbitt is pitched right as a Scottish Labour apparatchik, as is his colleague, who might actually have been Des Browne. Jon Snow is a welcome addition, although the news never seems quite so bad when Jon Snow's in command of it. The chip just won't stay on his shoulder. John Humphrys would have been a better choice. Jon Snow has sat in a jet beside a sleeping Idi Amin and contemplated shooting him in the head, but concluded the shot might bring the plane down. Humphrys would have suffocated the bugger with an antimacassar.

Volumnia is ice-cream delicious as a military matriarch: a Stannah Stalinist who'd eat Lady Macbeth for breakfast if only Lady Macbeth could haul herself out of bed for 5:15 when Volumnia eats her breakfast. Her army family, and Coriolanus' second army family that flocks around him when he returns to Corioles and it all goes a bit Apocalypse Now, build up such a backcloth of strangeness that the "unnatural scene they laugh at" fits right in. The stomach speech, and all the lines of that other woman that hangs around (Virginia? Valeria?) get cut and can count themselves lucky. Menenius quietly bleeds himself to death to get out of having to do any acting.

The Artist, though: good film, and good clean fun film. It's black and white and wordless, but it will still be the most conventional film you've ever seen Malcolm McDowell in. Don't be put off by the lack of dialogue: be put slightly off by the surplus of dialogue, because a proper 20s film wouldn't have had nearly as many title cards. Really, don't be put off at all.

Fuselit: Contraption Update

Contraption is, I swear to god, a couple of hours' coding and a session of bonus booklet printing away from being sent out to contributors and subscribers. The presentation boxes are sitting here - here, in this room! - half of them filled with completely sewn and finished copies of the main issue. The peripheries are just undergoing some tweaking. You know how it is - you did the cover to the bonus booklet six months ago but coming back to it today you're sure you can do a better job ...

The code? Oh, that's the game that we're putting on the disk. It's a text adventure! I'm an idiot who decided to write a text adventure for a literary magazine. It mostly works but it's a bit ... er ... arty.