Who reads poetry? I guess you do or else why would you be
looking at the Poetry Space website? Perhaps you write the stuff too and are
keen to find somewhere that will publish your work. There are many of us in the
same boat, expressing ourselves in verse and reaching out to an audience that
doesn’t appear to be that interested. If so many people admit to turning their
hand to writing poetry, especially when faced with an emotional crisis or a
significant event in their lives, why aren’t more people reading it?
I occasionally run writing workshops and I remember one
participant telling the group that she didn’t read anyone else’s poetry because
she didn’t want it to influence her own. But it’s precisely through reading
poetry by other people that we learn about the craft and about the range of
possibilities that the form offers. I am proud of my influences – George
Herbert, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Tony Harrison, to name just
a few – even as they look over my shoulder while I’m writing and tut when I
settle for a cliché or an easy rhyme.
Poetry exists because there is a tradition, and each time we
sit down to write a new poem we are drawing on that tradition, whether we
choose to emulate, challenge or disparage it. I only know what poetry is from
reading it. I get as much pleasure from reading a good poem as I do from trying
to write one, but how do I decide that it’s good? Not because the critics tell
me it is, that’s for sure. I recently had a stab at reading a highly-acclaimed
first collection by a rising star and felt both unmoved and frustrated, unmoved
because a certain coldness seemed to permeate the language and frustrated
because the poems were scattered with abstruse references that even the notes
didn’t really illuminate.
If that collection could be said to represent the zenith of
contemporary poetry, perhaps that’s why so few people are reading it. I don’t
want to get into an argument about elitism versus inclusiveness, but in spite
of being educated to a high level I struggle when I leaf through the slim
volumes in the poetry section of a bookshop (the section itself getting ever
slimmer) to find anything I want to read. At the risk of turning this into a
manifesto for my own work, I write what might be described as middlebrow poetry,
written to appeal to the same literate public that enjoys reading novels by
Nick Hornby or Anne Tyler, say, and watching episodes of Frasier on television. If more of this kind of poetry was made
available and promoted – and I know it’s being written by plenty of poets other
than me – I am confident more people would read poetry, as something that gives
pleasure or that speaks to the heart, and not something to turn to only when
someone gets married or dies.
Philip Lyons April 2012
Philip's first full collection Like It Is is published by Poetry Space Ltd and available from
