Difficulty, Academia, and the Young

V: I’ve been quite disappointed recently at how polarized the poetry world can be. When I’m in London speaking to young poets and people there, they like a range of poets — then I get back to Oxford, and talking to graduate students it can seem sometimes like the only poets taken seriously are Hill, Muldoon, Prynne — these are the serious poets.

CR: You can see why. There is a great difference between those poets, but they all have something in common — difficulty. If you’re a graduate student — this is professionalization again — you want to admire something that other people can’t read, where there is work for you. Those three poets represent an employment opportunity. They wouldn’t like Elizabeth Bishop because she is, relatively speaking, quite easy, although she isn’t really that easy — as you know. But there are so many local pleasures, and you persist. ‘Filling Station’ — how can anyone resist it? Well these people can. Because it’s witty, it’s lovely, and they understand it. It appears to offer them no opportunity … what critics want is a pommel horse they can pirouette around, which will continue to support them while they’re being brilliant themselves. Elizabeth Bishop — well, there’s no place for your brilliance, because the thing itself is brilliant. It’s made out of glass. It’s a piece of sculpture. Young people always like difficulty. You want to be outdistancing people. When I started doing a doctorate, it was on Coleridge’s philosophy — and the reason I did it was because I wanted to be able to say to people at a dinner party, ‘I think if you’d read Kant’s Critique der Reinen Vernunft, you’d know that … ’ I wanted to be able to silence people. It’s a terrible impulse. But of course in the end I couldn’t get through Kant, it was unintelligible. But that’s what I wanted to do — so I recognise this impulse in all these graduate students. I suffered through it myself once...

excerpt from Hard Raine: an interview
with Craig Raine by Vidyan Ravinthiran,
Horizon Review, September 2009

Horizon Review

So the third issue of Salt Publishing's online literary journal, Horizon Review, has just been published. Edited by Jane Holland, it's a fascinating, varied, sometimes even satisfyingly infuriating read, and builds on the strengths of its previous issues, proving it can easily compete with the best of the printed mags.

Issue 3 includes new poems by David Morley, Helen Ivory, Barbara Smith, Claire Crowther and Sam Riviere; reviews of many recent collections including Hugo Williams' West End Final, Carrie Etter's The Tethers, and a particularly excellent review of Don Paterson's Rain by John McCullough; and a series of interviews, the most interesting, contentious and quotable of these being Vidyan Ravinthiran in conversation with Craig Raine. In fact, I might well post a separate discussion of some of the stuff which Raine has to say here, finding as I did some bits eminently sensible, some disagreeably caustic, and some just downright antagonistic (not entirely a bad thing). I should also add that what he has to say is on occasion pretty funny, often illuminating, and... hell, just go and read it and I'll stop blathering on.

Also, for those interested (jumping from Don Paterson's aforementioned Forward Prize-winning Rain to Emma Jones's Best First Collection-winning The Striped World) in this week's issue of the Times Literary Supplement (October 16, No 5559) my reviews of both Jones's book and fellow Australian poet Kevin Hart's Young Rain will appear. Do check them out if you can.