In the 1980s, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned excessive use of caffeine (anything over eight Americanos a day), putting coffee up there with methylenedioxymethamphetamine and tuaminoheptane (not to mention cocaine and strychnine) as a performance enhancer. In 2004 caffeine was removed from the list and, as it were, re-legalised. Earl Grey tea was never proscribed, though space tea was. As poetry becomes more of a competitive art, with substantial purses, National Days and even
Attention to the moral character of the art at its most public is long over-due. Quite apart from the always-rumoured fixing of awards, there is an ugly history of substance abuse that needs to be acknowledged and put behind us. Coleridge’s use of laudanum resulted in ‘Kubla Khan’ and acute constipation. As a teenager Elizabeth Barrett Browning was prescribed palliative opiates for her back aches, with dreadful long-term consequences including Aurora Leigh. Keats, if we are to credit ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, evokes his heartache and numbness as though he had ‘emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk…’ after which he longs for alcohol, and to ‘Fade far away’ from the grim realities of the contingent world. George Crabbe used opiates and managed several poetic triathlons. So did Byron and Shelley and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. And Robert Louis Stevenson, not only in Jekyll and Hyde. Beyond Britain, Baudelairejoined the hazy Club de Hachichins with other writers and artists, and Rimbaud’s Season in Hell is in part an effect of stimulants. Poe had his addictions: one wonders if the tragacanth paste he used for his post-it notes might also have given him a mild high.
Allen Ginsberg started abusing substances in the late 1940s – nitrous oxide, marijuana, as well as alcohol and others; peyote and amphetamines contributed to Howl and Kaddish. These examples do no more than scratch the surface of a problem that could undermine public confidence in the art at the very time when it is going mainstream. Why should poetry, through selective exposure, not have its monitory Darryl Strawberry, Nate Newton, Todd Marinovich, or the edifying reformative example of a poetic Jennifer Capriati? It’s only fair, given the money that has flowed into the art in the last few decades. Furthermore, any poem from any period produced under the influence of laudanum, cannabis, LSD or alcohol should be struck from the books, especially school anthologies. Strict rules should also govern the activities of editors, publishers, selectors and other functionaries on Parnassus.
How much is at stake? A recent press release from the Academy of American Poets brings the numbers into focus. Joy Harjo, ‘known for wedding social consciousness to her Muskogee Creek heritage and the south-west American landscape’ in her poetry, received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens award for lifetime achievement. The academy praised her ‘visionary justice-seeking art’ which transformed ‘bitterness to beauty’ and ‘trauma to healing’. The academy awarded Kevin Young’s Book of Hours the $25,000 Lenore Marshall poetry prize, for ‘the year’s best collection’, and a $25,000 fellowship to Marie Howe. There was a drizzle of smaller awards and a big translation award to Todd Portnowitz ($25,000 and a five-week residency at the American Academy in Rome) for his work on Italian poet Pierluigi Cappello’s Go Tell It to the Emperor.
Taken with the Griffin, Forward, T. S. Eliot, Troubadour, National Poetry Competition, Resurgence, Hippocrates, Montreal, Lilly, etc, the challenge is clear. The poets celebrated in recent months are in no danger from the proposed Poetry Police, but how much more authority their awards would have were they accompanied by a certificate of clean life and unenhanced composition.
Extract from the editorial of PN Review 226
