Poetry Noir: A Dream Poem

By David Hamilton

David Hamilton has produced a collection of stories rooted in medieval forms but with contemporary concerns. While a poem is a subject it is also a journey and takes the reader to a higher state of consciousness as music does. People now like to pigeon hole everyone but Hamilton aims for versatility. A writers have their own styles and certain themes and ideas are foremost but each book is also meant to be original and have different features from the others. It is interesting to discuss whether Hamilton has created his own genre in that he writes books of poems which have essential features in common and can be called concept poems. The concept is thematic and crosses over individual poems.

Storyteller is told by Hamilton at the Storytellers Festival and features stories in verse which take us through imaginative worlds where we encounter real life experiences and thus on to a higher state of awareness. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth talked of the need to create his own audience for his new form, but here we are drawn into the train of poetry and find common experience we share.

This collection is slightly different in style and technique from the previous poetry books and incorporates songs and music which was stepping into the unknown It is developed from a primary idea in this case Storyteller which is inspiration, rather than rational development from a plan.

Readers of historical fiction, fact, and especially Shakespeare fans, I'm sure, will enjoy this book. It's very educational. If published online, American readers will probably be the largest audience. I'm sure they'll enjoy the Englishness of it, especially well-educated academics for the exquisite use of language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789554854

David Hamilton

Dave Hamilton is an ecologist by profession, working primarily in the area of wetland ecology. He has been carving and competing in shows for almost 20 years. While Dave enjoys carving a variety of bird species, he specializes in hummingbirds and in the wading birds common to the wetlands he works on professionally. He also enjoys carving stylized pieces and reproductions of antique decoys. Dave lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he carves, teaches classes, and is a member of the Northern Colorado Woodcarvers.

Book preview

Festival

Introduction

There are various types of poem but only one style is accepted by the literary establishment who edit the principal magazines and do reviews and that is patterned language. It is mechanical and uses clever surface wordplay like a modern version of Metaphysical verse. It is a rational process like crossword puzzles as Andre Breton accused Salvador Dali of doing in his Paranoiac-Critical period. There are other ways like poetry of imagination and working out patterns rationally is different from writing from inspiration. Stream of Consciousness is in this category.

The question of literature is not what does it mean, as we ask when reading a letter or official document, but what does it do? How does it affect us? Through literary devices and imagery it can attain transcendence or spiritual uplift ranging from giving pleasure to lifting feelings to a higher state, which I discuss in some poems in this book as I did in Storyteller: On the Journey of Poetry(1). I have tried to show that poetry, has a transcendent function that lifts us up and expands our consciousness; in negative and dissolute time’s evil people use it to destroy art and spread selfishness, negative emotions and unhappiness.

University courses treat English Lit. as a branch of History and there are preliminary questions as a poem is not a conduit for its period but has interior qualities independent of time and traditional elements, not just contemporary. Does a poem belong to its time and place? If it is significant and meaningful it becomes universal and profound as exploring a deep aspect of human nature. Several fit into this category like Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe. What they achieve is depth of meaning in that they explicate deep essential human feelings. I wrote about depth of meaning in an essay on Shakespeare (2)

Literature like life and history has lessons for us because it helps us understand human nature. Is the framework of history an ideological imposition or an organising interpretation? The selected facts are organised and different ideologies interpret them differently but the facts are sound. Homer or Shakespeare, they are still individual writers under the accretion of years of comment and interpretation. When I researched outlaw legend Wild Humphrey Kynaston (3) in the Public Records Office and various libraries I had a clear goal: to find evidence of the real life of a legend as distinct from the legend, to uncover the historical character and interesting events from his real life. The myths of outlaws are similar and all similar but their real stories are exciting. History shows how human nature operates. Poetry is like myth and stems from the unconscious rather than the rational faculties.

Poetry and Public

Contemporary philosophers and literary critics use empty abstractions without substance and treat flesh and blood people as not having human nature like Jean Baudrillard’s idea that events like the Gulf War are not real but images or Hitchcock’s line that a face does not exist till a light is shone on it are like Bishop Berkeley’s old ideas and exemplify the removal of substance from ideas. This is the disappearing subject, the disappearance of substantial people and their replacement conceptually with abstractions, like an author not writing a poem. One can admire a beautiful view and have all sorts of thoughts and feelings but only nuts would say their looking altered the view or that it disappeared.

The idea that part of the meaning is not in the poem and the reader puts it in, takes us to a level of unreality that shows how out of touch literary thinkers are. If it is not in the poem then it is not part of the poem’s meaning but the reader puts it in.

A writer is essentially, an active creator sending messages to passive readers who may individually have their feelings or imaginations activated. This passive reader is mentally creative in response and sees various aspects of their selves and lives in it but they do not write it, it pre-exists their reading of it.

It is fifty years since academics hailed the importance of the dynamic reader and dismissed the writer; now poets ignore the reader to congratulate other poets and give each other prizes. Poetry is no longer written for the public but for one another by poets who are academic not street wise. The public are denied what they want. It is confined to inward-looking courses in universities known as the Creative Writing Industry which is a machine for mass producing writers. I have contacted Writing West Midlands and offered to offer to help new writers to develop their own styles but the organisation refused but offering me a writing course: everyone must be taught to write in the same way and no difference can be allowed. I asked the Literary Consultancy for advise on agents etc they refused to help.

There has been much academic stuff written on writers and readers; the connection between author and reader and how the work links them and for a time bonds or divides them. There is the No Author Fallacy promulgated by such as Derrida and Barthes who feed off the creators of the poem. There is an immediate distinction: the writer is a creator, the critic lives off them by analysing their creations and can strengthen the poem's standing. The two functions are opposite: one brings something into being the other dissects and labels it; one gives life, the other is botanical and examines the parts that make the whole and categorises them.

We seek meaning in the poem to find its individuality, its difference from others, to see it as an individual poem. If you pursue the reader as writer fallacy you get many versions of a poem all false objectively, if not personally. There is a case for this in a writer because if they write it down they have by a process of transformation been inspired not to imitate but create something new.

We can ask questions: When does a poem finish? Or does it? Is the full stop the end? It ends when the idea, related ideas, the imagery, choice of word and literary devices ends, with the final full stop. You write what is in your mind and when you have written it ends. It’s like anything else, say, a letter, it ends when the writer finishes. If you return to the subject later there are two poems or two parts, not one, unless it is clearly stated that the original is being extended.

By Establishment or Elites we mean a controlling group in a field of activity that defines styles and vocabulary and this is performed now by reviewers and editors of the major literary magazines. They might not even like each other but identify with one another and are self-consciously part of a bloc and move to jobs with different journals of superficially different political stances like Conservative, Socialist, centre left or right and easily fit in. They enjoy having the power to promote or suppress and are on a defined path promoting and seeking more of the same which exhibits features of the expected formula. Constructive criticism is very helpful but critiques are often used to control literary fashion and keep the dominant group and ideology in power in the way teaching only one type of writing is meant to do.

See how Modern artists were first treated, or the attempted suppression of early Rock 'n' Roll stars you get an idea of how this works. The most telling thing was a literary journal would not take an advert from me until I removed a line that described me as The Rebel Poet: that is censorship. Advertising myself as rebel offended their totalitarian outlook.

T.S.Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) wrote that new works changed the cannon when they were accepted; if they are accepted they change literary styles and fashion and of course the cannon but first the literary establishment resist the new because it has a stunning effect on them. They don't know what to make of it until one provides labels for them.

An important function of critics is to make new creations safe for the reader and not rebellious. I recall R.D.Laing in, I think, The Divided Self, stating that Isaiah's Biblical visions were symptoms of schizophrenia. This was an attempt to normalise a form of irrational perception and make it manageable to the average, rational psychiatric mind. Editors of literary journals have a similar function and suppress challenges to the status quo or normalise new products to make them safe for orthodox literary magazines.

The nature or nurture dilemma: students’ who do not have much spark of creativity are taught how to write the form of verse, which is why so much seems empty and does not fulfil its purpose. The public distrust it and view it as precious, pretentious and remote.

The technique is form and can be taught but the content is a knack which is natural and cannot be taught. That is when artists are called gifted or "inspired. A lot of the criticism of my work quoted following was to teach me the formula and standardise my writing. They quash new styles to preserve the status quo.

If one is inspired to write say, by a broken relationship, as some of my sections were in Concept Poems (4), despite other or extraneous symbols or interpretations found, there is still an intended meaning. The reader still sees things not intended, but that removes neither intention nor the author. Despite that we need to ask more what a poem does than what does it mean.

It is work of the imagination. A reader does not go to a poem for logical facts or rational argument, but is open to images and feelings as it is an imaginative piece of writing. You do not take the words at surface meaning as they are expansive and look deeper for rhapsodic moments, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, symbols and allegory and many more devices. That is how the words affect us. A cause of obscurity is the writer writing things they do not completely understand as they come from the unconscious in the process of writing. There are also conscious attempted to be obscure to seem clever as patterned-language poets do.

There are meanings of words and symbols to find as we look for the writer’s meaning. We would not expect improving literature or moral lessons as Political Correctness has replaced that.

When Bob Dylan was producing great poems like Queen Jane Approximately and Desolation Row on his Highway 61 album, many were enthralled by his extravagant and obscure use of imagery, much of the pleasure came from trying to work out what he meant, what the images represented. The lady who commissioned the Ideological Critic noted that Dylan and Neil Young who created symbolic rock music were putting them to simple melodies. Maybe, but they were massively popular and made people aware of symbolism.

It is professional critics who do not like imagery and symbolism and are trying to prevent change. This closed attitude comes when a movement and style is coming to an end and adherents need to impose thoughts and styles to try to maintain it. A preliminary consideration is that ideology is brought to bear on the object to change it or absorb it; empirical examination can lead to an ideology, but begins with a consideration of the object whereas ideology begins with ideology and imposes its features on the work or rejects it. Each situation is given the same explanation as in the criticisms of my work.

From a psychological perspective the devotees of the formulaic, ideological style of poetry are self-consciously liberal, open-minded, tolerant, and opposed to prejudice and oppression but their close identification with the poetic orthodoxy causes their shadow sides to come into play when presented with something innovative and different and the qualities they consciously disdain are brought to bear on the unorthodox offerings and they suppresses new styles, discriminate against unknown writers who do not use the formula and when they reject new work by telephone are prejudiced and vicious. It is like talking to religious and political devotees. They are never wrong and very unfair as they condemn you on ideological grounds without properly reading your work.

Contemporary art is financed by the state and is a species of state art as I explained in the Appendix to King Alfred's Jewel (5). This is a literary establishment financed through the Arts Council who set directions and parameters to what can be encouraged and produced. Unless you follow their guidelines you do not get grants.

It is interesting to note that they are frequently judges in literary competitions, part of wide networks and accept received parameters about literary merit and styles and repeat orthodox opinions and are effectively working for the state. I was viciously attacked by a prejudiced critic who I shall call the Ideological Editor and the criticism fell on where my work differed from the approved style.

He wrote: Your poetry rarely does more than carry your opinions, rarely work as poetry, as it has little lyricism, metrical structure, memorability, imagery that rises above the generic and clichéd, even the critical opinions are not specific. The targets, he added, "were vague and advised they would have more persuasiveness if reframed as essays."

I asked one, a Neutral Editor for a second opinion. On the above judgements she said: I don’t see any clichés in what you have here. What’s wrong with opinions? If we didn’t need different opinions or ideas, humankind would only have one poem. Your opinions and ideas are ant important part of your work.

Wordplay operates on the surface, playing word games and erects walls of words to keep the reader out rather than open to depth of meaning. To encourage me to conform to the approved style the Ideological Editor recommended Geoffrey Hills: Speech! Speech! "Whose examples are specific and the language highly inventive rather than merely stating a position." Hill makes points about the shallowness of contemporary culture through a chorus of overlapping, interrupting and often self-contradicting voices. The editor quoted in Storyteller criticised me for the same reasons but recommended Robert Frost. I shall call her Editor1.

The attack confused and dispirited me for a time. Like Ideological Editor, Editor1 thinks I should eschew imagination and be literal and fashionable and use surface word patterns. Ideological Editor objected that the world of my dystopian society is not fully drawn and its streets are entirely symbolic as "old Roman roads lined with crucified criminals where people who don’t care what happened before they were/Born, are forever children….infantilised and silly…nihilistic and selfish." The characters are judged as abstractions but you do not show the behaviour that condemned them, just the judgement.

Editor1 also urged me to describe actions. They want us to write by the expected formula taught by the Creative Writing Industry. I was advised that a poem is a metaphor. That is a fashionable view. The concept at the centre of the poem is an essence.

Ideological Editor dismissed Dali’s Flower, a flow of images, for being symbolic.

"A flower will grow from the egg? I’m not quite sure that’s the image you want your reader to have."

It is from Salvador Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) and I use it as a symbol of growth. This shows the positive and negative aspects of sources. This style of Dali's art is the Paranoiac-Critical period which is surface cleverness as Andre Breton pointed out. His religious period in the fifties is deeper and graver and shows a move to substance over cleverness, though his technique was especially stunning.

On the Harlequin I referred to, Neutral Editor remarked: If you introduce a character, it’s good to follow that character through until they impart a lesson or build the plot.

This is an important point. Does poetry have a plot? A narrative poem that tells a direct

Story has a plot just like a piece of narrative prose has, say, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. A lyric poem, which simply describes a scene or expresses a feeling, doesn't have a plot. A linear progressive poem has a plot but a static poem may be a feeling or utterance its weight uniformly distributed throughout. The concepts I use are developed through different characters and a journey do not have strong linear development like films unfolding a narrative line. That is the Editor confusing forms again.

The Neutral Editor was fair:

I think you're super creative, which is awesome, but you have several poems in one in Dali's Flower so on your next pass through this poem, identify themes and put them into separate poems. Right now, the big chunk of text might discourage readers. We always have to remember we’re competing with Twitter and Facebook, where short posts are what people are used to reading.

I am not competing with anyone least of all Twitter and Facebook. I write the best I can and hope people enjoy it. I am not going to join the dumbing down process which insults the reader and is meant to de-educate the masses making them susceptible to political control. Further, if people don't know what a word is they must look it up in a dictionary. The elites treat readers as stupid but I refuse to do that and I believe people enjoy learning.

The ideological editor went on in his negative way and described "the engagement with past and present, art and its fictional world of Re-Creation Centres, and debased, exploitative, elites who threaten the very nature of humanity. It's all explanation and assertion rather than demonstration and practice. To write when outlining the thoughts of various audience members, that Verse is our feelings translated into words, expressing emotions...." is not writing poetry but describing it, and putting the words in the voice of an undefined, generic audience does not offer any insight into the character, either their inner life or even lack of one. This is shown by all the ‘Audience’ voices being identical.

As far as content is concerned I am showing how human nature diverts ideals to self-interest. I am also trying to re-define poetry because it is in crisis of definition and confused. As for "Showing not telling" poetry is a verbal medium not spectacle like film or drama nor does it require the creation of a realistic world like realistic fiction as in, say Middlemarch. It is not bound by rules of realism. I would expect that advice in a scriptwriting book by Syd Field or Robert McKee, but not appropriate for poetry. They should not be judged that way.

Editor1, another creative writing teacher, also disliked my use of symbolism and allegory and also wanted me to show not tell in a literal way: "Show the lovers walking, the sweat on their brows in the heat etc. But there were no lovers. It was an allegory. They advocate literalism and as ideologues try