This week's blog is taken from the editorial of PN Review Issue 235 (May-June 2017), written by the editor Michael Schmidt.
Every Day is World Poetry Day
The international calendar is littered with poetry occasions. Portugal’s national day is called Camoes Day after the author of Os Luciadas. 21 August is said to be National Poet’s Day in the UK (or National Poets’ Day, depending on your politics). Every Friday someone downs tools early and declares it poets day.* New Zealand celebrates poetry this year on 25 August. We are always geared up for the UK’s National Poetry Day with its ‘themes’ (2000: Fresh Voices, 2004: Food; 2009: Heroes and Heroines; 2013: Water, water everywhere; 2017: Freedom). It was founded by William Sieghart in 1994 and has reached its majority. This year it occurs on 28 September. Scheduled activities already abound, jointly and severally, in every conflicted corner of Great Britain. Ireland celebrates in April. Americans and Canadians have a whole National Poetry Month: May.
In March this year, however, World Poetry Day (traditionally the first day of Spring, as it happens) caught us on the hop. We were abruptly reminded of it when a book-trade journal asked us – just after noon the day before – to answer a fistful of questions:
1. How is the poetry market performing at the moment in comparison to previous years?
2. Why are poetry sales doing so well?
3. Are young people driving up sales specifically?
4. Is social media and performance helping to reinvigorate poetry / transform perceptions of it for young people?
5. Are current politics making poetry relevant again?
‘At PN Review,’ we wanted to say, ‘every day is World Poetry Day.’ We have in living memory published and reviewed poetry from thirty-odd languages, and from several centuries, being the journal par excellence of the space-time continuum. As fate would have it, in the March–April issue we carried essays on poetry in Spain, France, Wales, Ancient Greece, and modern Greece; we had Edwin Morgan writing (from beyond the grave) about translation; and we had translations too, from Hebrew, Italian, Bosnian, and French; as well as reviews of French and Chinese writing. In the current issue we bid farewell to Tsvetan Todorov, remember Pasternak; consider migrant writing, read poems translated from German and Ethiopian; and Edwin Morgan, again d’outre-tombe, discusses translation. Our anglophone contributions are drawn from six or seven nations in which English survives.
World Poetry Day, we decided, was not the occasion to sound our barbaric yawp. We thought it proper instead to question the assumptions behind some of the questions we had been asked. Perhaps that is why the trade journal that asked them in the first place decided to drop World Poetry Day as a story.‘The poetry market is rather erratic just now,’ we wrote. ‘Some books sell well. The reasons are the same old same old: poets who are good public readers sell at events; poets who win major awards sell; the increasingly rare poetry reviews in the dailies and weeklies have their effect; and sometimes a poet who just happens to be good sells, thanks to word of mouth amplified by social media. First collections are always news.’ But it behoves us to remember, we said, that ‘there is more poetry published than ever before, so if readership is growing, so, exponentially, is supply.’
We were also unconvinced that ‘young people’ as a constituency buy more poetry books (or books of any kind) than before. It would be nice if they did, but book buyers tend to be people with an established book habit and with shelves on which to put their acquisitions. Those often-touted ‘young people’ (a term which erases the differences of class, ethnicity, education, and dialect which survive in other demarcations, such as ‘old people’) can generally find the poems they want to read (or hear) online. Maybe if they buy books at events they will develop first a taste for reading and then the habit of acquiring books.
The number of such ‘young people’ is hard to quantify in the poetry market. Certainly social media contribute to people’s (not only ‘young people’s’) awareness of poets and poetry events. Poetry as a category is not in spate, but certain poets certainly are. And there is a lot of sizzle – the questions we were posed are evidence of it – though in the absence of a developed culture of reception, the size and quality of the steak are hard to estimate and impossible to assess.
As for the fifth question, on current politics: when we watched Donald Trump on television during his election campaign, we learned to appreciate how much he had learned from performance poetry. His hand gestures, his finger-circles and -erections, his pauses and emphases, his sincerities and sarcasms, his insinuations and provocations, share much with certain players on the performance circuit. Early in April the White House issued a statement to acknowledge its debt. Mr Trump and his advisers had spent hours, it confirmed, glued to YouTube, studying how not very good poets commanded substantial audiences by means of carefully contrived, professionally ‘spontaneous’ presentation, how they retreaded clichés and played to those ingrained prejudices and atavisms which pretend to be emotions. How effectively they deployed fake news. How they had mastered Twitter.
* Piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday.
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| 'O, Western Democracy!' by Alemu Tebeje, translated from the Ethiopian (above) by Chris Beckett in PN Review 235. |
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