Q&A With Poetry Lecturer, Critic and Faber Published poet Jack Underwood Part 2

Jack Underwood

I attended your lecture at Goldsmith's where you said it is "arguable" that Spoken Word poetry stems from oral traditions - What is the argument and why is there such a divide between the page and stage poets?  

I think I actually said that it is ‘arguable’ that ALL poetry derives from an oral tradition, and this is a very common understanding sometimes used to validate oral poetic traditions that seem otherwise subordinately positioned in relation to glossy Western literary ones. It’s actually a little backhanded, because it validates oral poetry by seeking to align it with the past of literary tradition rather than arguing the validity of subsequent and contemporary oral traditions on their own terms: oral traditions are of interest because they’re interesting, not because they happened to develop into literary ones hundreds of years ago, in the lute-strumming days before television. But this ‘origin’ argument is also upheld because classically, and from the point of view of historicism, writing has always been positioned as a secondary system, predated by speech. Writing came later, we are told, so things like literary rhyme are really throwbacks to the need for memorability in folk song and folk tale. This is the classic line.

I prefer the post-Derrida view which is that there is an underlying false prioritisation of speech over writing in the Western tradition that is in part to do with the perceived idea of the spoken word being somehow transcendental, expressed more wholly, more directly, so that speech is more easily located with personal truth, as if you were speaking from some corner of the body, like the heart, where you really meant it. This is of course nonsense, and writing is not merely ‘knowledge by repetition’ as Socrates argues, when he, ironically enough, transcribes a speech by Plato. You couldn’t argue the distinct qualities of one without the other: how could speaking be a ‘raw’ state of language when it requires the ‘cooked’ written word to exist in order to provide it with that very quality of ‘uncookedness’? Neither one came first. So, the ‘oral beginnings of poetry’ line is a Western philosophical myth based on a kind of common sense essentialism that goes back to Metaphysics and Plato, and is to do with the false division of language into ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ categories.

But then the page/stage ‘division’ isn’t really about any of this. I’d say the division begins with what you, as a poet, prioritise in your work, what you hope it will achieve in terms of an audience or readership, and those hopes are largely to do with your understanding of the tradition you’re working in, and what is deemed successful by that tradition, or within that medium: and they are two very different mediums and therefore very different traditions. In my first poetry classes, where the idea of performing a poem was never even brought up, we were told not to write ‘cry for help’ poetry, not to assume a reader’s interest in our lives, to create an objective distance between ourselves and our work and not to be satisfied with creating an amusing effect or stylish surface. There was general advice about how to interrogate an idea in a poem, how to necessitate an imaginative participation by your reader, how to invite complexity without disappearing up your own arse, and also guidance on how not to merely provide somebody with a didactic instruction towards a point of view. The division came along for my page peers and I, when we saw people at readings doing what seemed like the opposite of these things. There were lots of very good performance poets (‘Spoken Word’ started being used more in the mid-2000s, I think) who probably also spent their time working hard making their poems genuinely funny, or else making sure they were actually telling the audience something they thought was important, something about their lives or politics they wanted to express, and we saw these exact successful performative qualities as a kind of artlessness according to our contrary understanding of what a poem was up to. Written down, the differences between ‘us and them’ were only made clearer. We saw that the traditions were different, the aims were different, but there was a lot of polite attempts in the interests of convivial, community spirit to merrily reconcile the two, and pretend they were the same thing, which actually only cemented the distinction, and framed performers trying to do quite different things, as just being bad at what we were trying to do, which was unfair. I don’t expect a 2^nd wave Modernist to read on the page like I do, so why should I expect a performance poet to? I’m bored by the kind of tribalism that implies something Other is a malformed version of one’s own ‘pure’ form. You have to allow each poem to declare its own terms. You shouldn’t seek to herd up poets into tribes, nor should you be ignorant and suggest there are not different traditions and forces and strategies at play. I’m afraid it’s rather more complex than that, and to deny it either way is to give in to lazy conservative forces. I’ve always felt like this, in fact, only now I’m 34% less likely to declare it drunkenly to someone I’ve just met. Now I’m more likely to demand that a stranger watch a Holly Pester reading on my phone.

And of course, like most page poets, I do readings too, and must admit that I get a lovely narcissistic whoosh of the kind that only a room’s full attention gives you, so I know the appeal, but I also feel that when it comes to poems, desiring that whooshing feeling is actually a bit gross, because I don’t like the sweaty arrival of my needy ego into a room, because I feel I’m betraying the hard work I undertook with the full philosophical weight of my convictions towards ART, deliberately with a view not to make this about me, but rather about an idea or feeling of potential universal, philosophical value, and to make poetry thereby an essentially empathetic act. So when I’m up there, reading my work, reattaching the words to me, their author, it’s not empathy I’m enjoying, it’s self-love, it’s feeling agreed with, feeling loved. I don’t like the idea of monopolising what a poem is about by furthering the attachment of what it says to my authorial intention. I want to give it up to an Other so that it becomes more about them. I also dislike the ugly idea of my gauging something like the ‘mastery’ of an audience, which is vaguely pathetic when you think that most people don’t come to a reading to resist the charming poems in the first place.

So, I write for the page because I think that for all the social kudos of a decent reading, I should prioritise the making of a construct that is built to exist separate from me, to be absorbed quietly into the life and throat muscles of another, to be reliant certainly as much on their imagination. I’m fairly sure other page poets feel the same, if by degrees. To have something intoned, or acted out to me makes me feel like it is being indexed to the author by their performing it, and while that can be thrilling for some, it basically runs counter to the whole philosophy of language I ascribe to. I’m finding advantages, or disadvantages, I know. And of course there are plenty of performances that do not reattach the words to the central agency of the performer so much, and part of the distinction between performance poetry and Spoken Word seems to be about this; I’ve honestly not got much truck with crass tribalism or creating hierarchy. If I don’t like something it isn’t my superior taste or morality doing the business, it’s to do with my own hang-ups and priorities about what I do. So, I’m sure I’ll have put my foot in it again with this one, but I’m prepared to suggest that if there is still a divide, it might be to do with a hardening and poor handling of these kinds of feelings or reservations among page poets generally, and similar (if opposite?) concerns among performers about the awful poems they see on the page: the banal anecdotal poem, the politely emotional poem, the elitist, deliberately obscure, over-written arch and pretentious poem, the faux-postmodern reference to gaming, internet-chat-speak, and popular culture poem, the predictable anthropomorphising poem…Professionally, as a reviewer and lecturer I spend infinitely more time and energy attacking these prevalent deficiencies in the page world than I ever do bemoaning the laboured rhymes of a barroom versifier. The erstwhile politics of self-affirmation seem dumb when you realise how little you identify wholly with your own tradition, and equally how much else there is out there on the fringes. Have you read any Jennifer Knox, for example? I’m more interested in reading more widely and variously than I am chucking rocks over whatever wall at my stage-dwelling cousins. That sort of thing seems conservative and adolescent now. For me it’s about pursuing what interests me, and that could indeed be a stage poet, sure, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more intuitively and far more regularly drawn to other corners, and I think many other page poets feel the same.

Part 3 of this interview will include my response to this discussion, stay tuned.

Q&A With Poetry Lecturer, Critic and Faber Published poet Jack Underwood Part 1

Jack Underwood

The Q&A series continues - 29 year old Jack Underwood, a lecturer at Goldsmith University with a PhD in Creative Writing. I attended a lecture of his on Contemporary Poetry recently. Jack is in his late 20's, therefore he has an understanding that contemporary poetry isn't a title that belongs to modernist poets that died over half a century ago (HURRAH).  In his lecture he referred to Spoken Word, ridiculing the art-form and its place in Contemporary Poetry (that's what he does with all poetry, he's a critic). I reached out to Jack and was pleased he was up to meet and chat poetry over a hot toddy and a pint of Guinness.

Hope you don't mind me saying this, but aren't you a bit young to be a professor of poetry? ... I mean, what does that even mean? 

Well, I’m not a ‘Professor’, which is a much higher-ranking and esteemed position than the one I hold. As an early career academic I’m no way near that ballpark. I am a lecturer.

That means that I help discuss and problematise the philosophical territory, the ideas and questions around the subject of writing, with people who are also interested in writing, and I edit and discuss their work with them alongside those discussions. There is an ugly idea going around that knowledge, debate, and art should be required to justify themselves in terms of monetary return at some point and this is dangerous, so I’m definitely in favour of more poetry professors, lecturers, students etc. if it helps to argue otherwise.

oh' right, well you cleared that up... How does a poet educate?

I don’t educate ‘as a poet’ so much. My being ‘a poet’ is really only present via the practical knowledge of writing I might bring to the role, and the knowledge of the contemporary field I might have as a result of being somebody contributing to it, rather than trying to describe it. Educating as ‘a poet’ as an idea sounds a bit embarrassing, like I might give seminars entirely in verse, or click my fingers or wear jaunty hats or write on the white board with a quill or something.

But I sense you’re asking me if the values that poetry might advertise as a discourse are useful in teaching itself, which they are. Poetry (by which I mean good poetry) is largely a means of interrogation, of asking questions about difficult subjects, intersections, phenomena, so-called ‘Truths’. It also does so in a way that announces the provisionality and subjectivity of any possible answers to such questions, which in turn invites the question of whether such questions can be ‘answered’ at all, and this is essentially the rhetorical shape of most philosophy: we understand this thing according to these terms, and these terms in relation to this thing, and we will rejuvenate and reinvent the terms until the thing is seen from another perspective and the terms broaden and refine or die. That’s what poems do, and it’s what knowledge is: though this is all a little too general a point to make I’d say.

American playwright Gwydion Suilebhan ranted on twitter recently, taking swipes at all contemporary poetry by stating, “Poetry is dead. What pretends to be poetry now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It’s zombie poetry. There is no longer, really, any formal innovation possible. The constraints of meter have long been abandoned. What is left? It is a parroting of something that used to be radical. It is about as useful as the clavichord. There is no “Howl possible or “Song of Myself.” There is no “The Waste Land.” - 

Does poetry have a golden era? when was it and what has changed?

The whole hierarchial approach to poems is weird to begin with, but the idea of a best age is dumb because you’d have to set a firm criteria to judge bestness and then apply it merrily across all of history. I pity the sociopath that has missed the mark so widely that they feel the need to be so empirical about poems, to set poetry in competition with itself on such reductive terms. I didn’t realise the sociopath I’d be pitying was an American playwright, though. That is news! On the other hand ‘vague nonsense’ sounds like something I could enjoy, and something Mr Suilebhan appears to do a mean line in himself, judging by the generality of his arguments above.

There are tons of lazy ideas I’d object to here, but I think they largely announce themselves: we’ll never write another Howl, for instance? Well I was rather under the impression we already had one of those. I just sure hope Mr Suilebhan doesn’t write another play using the tired formal tactic of actors, or involving the constraints of speaking or movement, otherwise he might accidentally bump off theatre too and find himself out of job. Then maybe he’d have to take up talking spurious shit full-time. 

Pablo Neruda says "poetry comes from the people, poetry belongs to the people" - what is the divide between poetry and "the people"? why does it exist?

I’m not sure who “the people” are, really. I do believe in society, in collective responsibility and poetry can be part of that, but what is Neruda saying poetry doesn’t come from and isn’t for? The State? I don’t know what he’s on about, basically. Sorry Ray. I would, by way of a more general waft in that direction, say that I do see poetry as a means of affront to the pervasive capital value system we have, because it seeks to foreground other ways of looking that might suggest different systems of value and understanding, but I think there are all kinds of art forms that overthrow that system, if only for a second. If there is a divide between the poetry world and other people it is probably because they don’t need or value the terms of overthrow that poetry provides, for whatever reason. Maybe they prefer circus skills, or sex.

You are a renowned critic of poetry, does this role make you more self-conscious when writing your own poetry?

I don’t think I’m ‘renowned’ as a critic at all, really Ray, though it’s flattering to be thought of that way because my prose always seems very awkward to me, and I’m a painfully slow reader. I do write reviews for Poetry London, and now for Poetry Review, and it might have got round that I’m fussy, and I don’t actually like very much poetry, and that’s true! But I’m not a bully, and I don’t expect to be agreed with. I think it’s good to reserve the right to be fickle in your tastes: you don’t like the cauliflower poem because you hate cauliflower? Fine. I think why you like something is very complex and weird and unpredictable. That’s why in reviewing I tend to keep my subjective taste out of it and just try to describe what’s going on. A couple of very good friends were telling me they thought this was opting out, being too polite and nice: “of all the opinionated, harsh, snobbish people I know…” they were saying. Well, I guess I know how tenuous my feelings can be day to day, how a poem works uniquely with each reader and their associations, so why should I publicly prioritise my own reading in a magazine read entirely, bar one exception, by people who aren’t me?

For my own writing I don’t think about criticism, no. I don’t think about language theory, current trends, but all that stuff might creep in after, during editing (when does the point of writing begin or end anyway? At your desk? The day before when you made a weird connection? The year before, the day you learned the word ‘concubine’? When you learned to write at school?). At the first draft stage I just tend to concentrate on the feeling, the idea, or the feeling of the idea, or an idea as the feeling. I like the idea of writing as a physical act. Not in a mystical way, but in terms of writing being a gestural, moody, visceral business where you welcome the unconscious wobbly bits to the table too. I’m not especially cerebral. I don’t like certainty. Maybe these instincts and the fact that I try and shut everything too conscious out, are a result of certain critical understandings: a sort of negative pressure being exerted, but if ever I feel that I’ve ‘deployed’ something too consciously I screw up my face and go and read Lorca: wash that sense of ‘craft’ and ‘device’ out of my system. Craft is for nerds and repressed perverts. It’s the dullest kind of fetishism. Craft is to poetry what driving-gloves are to a road-trip.

You were part of the Faber New Poets series, what was it like working with the most prestigious poetry-publishing house in the UK?

We got to go to (Seamus) Heaney’s 70^th Birthday Party! That was weird and good. The Faber New Poets series was obviously very good for me in terms of finding an audience for my work. The tour was amazing fun, and I’m glad it was a pamphlet-length thing, because in fairness I have needed the three or four years since to get a measure on what kind of poetry I actually like, and ought to try and write myself. I went down a rather self-satisfied route for a while afterwards, playing around for the sake of it. Being a FNP has basically bought me valuable time to put together a book I feel comfortable putting into the world. We’ll see how that turns out, and where it might end up living soon, I hope.

Otherwise I’m still editing Stop Sharpening Your knives, and I’m curating a reading series for us, the first of which is on the 14^th May at the Servants Jazz Quarters in Dalston, so I’m looking forward to the narcissistic whoosh of reading things out again, obviously. I’m still knocking out the odd poem too, thankfully, and drinking booze with people like Raymond Antrobus occasionally…

Part 2 of this interview has Jack talking about the tensions between page poets and stage poets, and why oral tradition and poetry aren't as linked as many people claim they are... Stay tuned...