[John Beaton]

On Barbara's "Accessibility and Depth" thread, she suggested looking at how a "populist" poet makes his work successful. For some time, I've been intrigued by Felix Dennis, a British poet who has clearly tapped into the general public's appetite for poetry. There was a thread involving him a while back. As you can see, the Board reaction was quite mixed.

Conversely, he doesn't mince words about the poetry world. This article contains the following:

On poetry, he attacks the "closed shop" of the poetry establishment that looks down on his work, and poets whose work is too obscure to have any popular appeal.

"It's total snobbery. They can't make a living out of it - so they make a virtue out of writing incomprehensible gibberish."

He is wealthy and notorious and, according to Wikipedia, one of his books states he has spent over $100 million on drugs and women.

Even allowing that he is excellent at self-promotion (free wine at his poetry recitations), he has clearly struck a chord with the general public far more effectively than most other poets. Here's a TED Talks sample of his work.

I expect others on the Board, especially those from Britain, know much more about him than I do. I think he makes a good subject for a discussion of what makes a "populist" poet successful. I have my own thoughts, but I'll start the discussion by opening it to others first.

He's fighting cancer at the moment. I know this because I've "friended" him on Facebook!

Barbara suggested analyzing a specific poem so here's one to get your teeth into.

John

[Mary McLean]

Fun choice. I discovered Felix Dennis a few months ago on the excellent poetryarchive.org website. The recordings really make his poetry (his voice is wonderful). My favorite of his is 'Downsizing', but I do also like 'Summer of Love'.

The main thing that comes across even on the page is his savage wit. I think that's what makes this poem. He really lets his younger self have it; but with affection too. There's nostalgia, but the poem doesn't drip with it the way some populist writers can, because of the darker undercurrent.

As far as the surface goes, the syntax is clear and the meter is reasonably regular (trochaic with varying numbers of feet per line). If this is a specific form I don't recognize it. There's not much enjambment to break up the monotony, but the sing-song effect is presumably what he's going for. The repetition of the first 2 lines in each stanza contributes further to making this feel like a song. (Is he perhaps the Anti-Dylan?)

Dennis has published an enormous number of poems, and I think a lot of them are probably stinkers, but I like this one a lot.

[Jayne Osborn]

Hi John,

I started that thread you gave the link to, and as you can see on it, I love Felix Dennis!
My husband, who's not a poet but likes only strictly metrical stuff, has been with me twice to see him perform on his "Did I Mention the Free Wine?" tours. We both thoroughly enjoyed the poems... (and the wine!)

Felix is a bit of a showman, and well worth going to see. No one's poems are all brilliant, but I think many of his are very good. People DO like to hear rhyming poetry, so good on 'im for attacking the establishment!

I'm really sorry to hear that he's fighting cancer and hope he has a good recovery.

Jayne

[Maryann Corbett]

John, I enjoy the poem you link to and I expect the thread will be fun. But I see you start off by saying that Barbara suggested

looking at how a "populist" poet makes his work successful.

Barbara's question was not about success. It was

So, how do we make poems that are both accessible and have depth?

Dennis clearly has the accessibility part down. But will we be discussing depth?

[Mary McLean]

Well, what do we mean by depth? If what we want is for a poem to tell us something about the human condition, Dennis doesn't do too badly. He gives us candid reminiscence about his own past, and although not all of us shared those experiences, I'm sure we can all relate to looking back on our younger selves with a wince. The perspective of age changes how we assess our previous beliefs and behaviours. I particularly like 'and our women made us tea' as an exposure of the hypocricy of his nominally progressive views. And the final line is a killer indictment of the ultimate emptiness of his posing philosophy.

There are deeper poems out there, but I don't accept that this one is completely shallow.

[Maryann Corbett]

I wasn't saying so, Mary, though I did want to question John's phrasing.

Dennis does a good job of puncturing the self-regard embodied in those late-60s experiences and habits of mind. He makes a successful (read: popular) poem of them, first of all, by latching onto the fact that nearly everyone of a certain age who had those experiences has asked "How did I change so much"? or "Was I really that silly?" The observations about the machismo and hypocrisy of the time are certainly right, but I'd say they're right out there on the poem's surface.

Some of the depths in "Summer of Love" are a little less attractive. For starters, he's parodying "Recuerdo" by Edna St. Vincent Millay by aping its form, even down to the repetitions of "We were..." and the refrain-like opening lines of the stanzas. (He even reads it with exactly the same rhythm I've heard Millay use in a well-known recording.) I'd be willing to bet that--at least in America--his contemporary readers don't know the first thing about that poem, though they may have heard Millay's name. So why allude to her? I'd say his reason is to twit the literati. "Literary types" are the only ones who will get his point that Millay's famous self-indulgence is an archetype of the hippy-dippy approach.

Speaking of "hippy-dippy" let's look at "mighty Mississippi." This is one of those cases in which the search for a rhyme "drives" something with interesting effects. On the one hand, since the summer of love is connected unshakably to San Francisco, or Woodstock, or else to the whole country, "Mississippi" seems a little off. But "mighty Mississippi" is a phrase out of folk song and folk memory--which brings up the fact that the heyday of folk music was also still around, though fading, then. It's also a stock phrase, nearly a cliche, which begins to set us up to think about how stock-phrase-driven so much thinking was at the time.

I should be working now, so I'll stop there, but those two points seemed immediately clear to me.

[Don Jones]

We in America have Billy Collins, though I would wager he is a wee bit more literary than this chap, whose bravura performance is very entertaining.

So, if we look at British poets we might say there is Felix Dennis on one end of the accessibility spectrum and Geoffrey Hill on the other end (I would love to be a fly on the wall if those two were to meet – maybe they have!). So if in the States we have Billy Collins (also a millionaire by way of publishing his poetry et al.) on one end, then we have, um, who on the other? Well, perhaps Richard Kenny (e.g. “The Invention of the Zero”) or H.L. Hix? Others can fill in their candidates.

Don

[Ann Drysdale]

But who is it that does the classification?

Call me Lemuel. I watch and wonder.

If the deep-endians condemn the poetry that the shallow-endians enjoy, is it because of their distaste for the poetry or for the shallow-endians? Do they feel that to do otherwise would be "slumming"?

Likewise, if the shallow-endians refuse to engage with the poetry of the deep-endians, is it because they can't or because they don't care to - for fear of being labelled snobs?

Is it, I mean, a social question at some level?

I have no answer to this. I just write the stuff and have fallen foul of both camps over the years. But poetry in general deserves better than that. To whose gods should one sacrifice the bullock?

[Don Jones]

Well, I am not the final arbiter of what is accessible and what in contrast is obscure, but my placing Felix Dennis at one end and Geoffrey Hill on the other is not a bad attempt.

To make a clearer case of an ideal balance between the two extremes, I just thought of our very own Wendy Videlock. Now she is a very literary writer in that she knows her stuff, yet her poetry is accessible and very enjoyable to read. Plus, like Dickinson, her hero, she makes you ponder what is written. More than once I have had to re-read a Videlock poem numerous times to get beyond her simple diction floating on the surface of her poems. Her simplicity beckons beyond its sheer and squeaky clean surface.

She is a wonder that Wendy. Perhaps she is at the mid-point between the two chaps mentioned above? Again, I'm not making final judgments.

Perhaps, to echo the other thread to which this is a parallel twin, the issue is how much literature is behind a text. I had a Russian literature professor who once said that "literature takes more from literature than from life." I gave him a scowl to which he said in front of my fellow students, "screw you!" A man after my own heart. We became friendly after that and had at least one chat about literature. Good man. Good memory. My take at the time was that literature takes more, or at least as much, from life as it does from literature--as Felix Dennis seems to do.

In reference to poetry that may be less accessible we may also speak of style or how the language is used. Not the way the language is expected to be used but how it is reshaped to spark thrilling insights and associations. Helen Vendler once wrote, I paraphrase, "a great poet is first a poet of the language." This can mean a number of things but from her admittedly ivory tower perspective she means that the "greats" imprint their style and manner onto the language, that they in effect forever change they way we read the language and they way it can be used.

Geoffrey Hill in contrast to Dennis and Videlock is obviously deeply embedded in the mesh not only of the history of the English language and its ocean of texts but of other languages as well (the Joycean revolution). I admit I love being challenged but that could mean a poem difficult on its surface or one with a riptide in clear waters, which pulls you out into unannounced depths - like Ms. Videlock's poetry.

[Chris Childers]

Originally Posted by Don Jones

Perhaps, to echo the other thread to which this is a parallel twin, the issue is how much literature is behind a text. I had a Russian literature professor who once said that "literature takes more from literature than from life." I gave him a scowl to which he said in front of my fellow students, "screw you!" A man after my own heart. We became friendly after that and had at least one chat about literature. Good man. Good memory. My take at the time was that literature takes more, or at least as much, from life as it does from literature--as Felix Dennis seems to do.

I'm with your professor. Poetry teaches us what it is and how to write it, not life. Someone with an interesting life, who doesn't know a thing about poetry, will write far worse poems than someone with a boring life who knows poetry. Poetry is the sine qua non of writing poetry, not "life experience." (Of course, it's best both to know poetry and have life experience; but it's the former that allows one to make poems out of the latter.)

C