In your editorial to Rialto 84 you challenged your readers to challenge you and Fiona. Taking you at your word, here\u2019s my challenge.<\/p>\n
Your Editorial vaunts the magazine\u2019s eclecticism. What struck me however was not the wide ranging diversity of the poems in this issue but their extraordinary similarity to each. They share common assumptions about how poems are made. For example of the sixty or so poems featured not one ventured into rhyme \u2013 delightful concinnity for the reader, tedious chore for the poet. This is surprising because of your four advocates, three of them \u2013 Duffy, Armitage, Motion \u2013 are adept and frequent rhymers ( I\u2019ve never worked out what formal strictures Jo Shapcott submits to). Poems don\u2019t have to rhyme, of course. But, if not rhyme, these poets always make life difficult for themselves by working with some technical constraint for them to push against \u2013 the constrictions of the line\u2019s length, its rhythm, prosodic factors \u2013 anything<\/em> that raises the matter above prose. Whatever the form, though, it\u2019s never arbitrary but is a function of the content and it\u2019s the formal factors of a poem that give the reader the means to unlock it. To quote Ted Hughes: \u2018There is a sense in which every poem that comes off is a description or dramatization of its own creation. Within the poem is all the evidence you need for explaining how it came to be and why it is as it is.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n But technical poetics aren\u2019t easy. The skills, acquired over years of practice like playing the piano or striking a tennis ball, aren\u2019t taught in creative writing classes, where writers are encouraged to write about what they know \u2013 principally themselves<\/em>. The poems in 84 eschew formal techniques. They are written in free verse where the more or less random end stop is the only factor that makes the writing look more or less different to prose. (The sly repetitions in Les Murray\u2019s tight gnomic quatrains are an exception that proves my point.) This is not to say that all the poems are not good, but that they cohere around a restrictive idea about what a poem is \u2013 informal\/unformal, confessional, easy to read, smart.<\/p>\n Since Ted Hughes\u2019 Birthday Letters<\/em> it has become voguish for writers to gossip about themselves. In two thirds of the poems in 84 the poet\u2019s voice intrudes in the form of first person monologues or anecdotes. How the world looks from the writer\u2019s point of view. I don\u2019t know about you but I\u2019m not particularly interested in other people\u2019s inner life and perceptions about the world. (It\u2019s my own that exercise me). The fallacy that the poem\u2019s purpose is to convey the poet\u2019s emotion<\/em> which is promulgated in writing courses seems to me to be the converse of what a poem should aim to do. It\u2019s the reader\u2019s<\/em> emotions that are paramount, not the writer\u2019s. The poem is a machine to touch the reader\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n One consequence of this literalising of poetic discourse is the demise of metaphor (largely absent from 84). The power of figurative language in a figurative landscape\u2013 sometimes called negative capability.<\/em> A poem, in contrast to prose narrative, must be greater than the sum of its parts \u2013 like a coded message. The self-referential let\u2019s-talk-about-me poem takes for granted that words convey meaning, as a letter to a friend allegedly does; that language is not a totalitarian authority to be eluded by cunning cloak and dagger. The poet is a spy behind enemy lines. The last thing he should do is betray himself.<\/p>\n Neil Ferguson<\/em> <\/p>\n Thank you for taking up our challenge to challenge. You sent me back through issue 84 in self-challenge mode. I liked your analysis of the \u2018common assumptions about how poems are made\u2019 and agree with some of it, though less with your conclusions. Fortunately; otherwise I\u2019d be hurling myself off an editors\u2019 suicide cliff into a cold sea.<\/p>\n The first thing to say is that we publish the best of what we get, which tends to reflect contemporary trends in poetry. It\u2019s rare to find good poems with full rhyme and\/or formal metre. Most poets aren\u2019t writing them.<\/p>\n We read many poems that don\u2019t try hard enough, and a big reason why is lack of technical constraints. These not only make the writer work hard, they also force her\/him away from the obvious path. Such constraints vary according to era, fashion etc. Contemporary poetry tends to shun the more obvious ones and the closure effect that full rhyme and\/or strict metre can give. There\u2019s more half rhyme \u2013 plentiful in English, with potential for interesting effects. The ear attunes to half rhymes and spots even the slightest ones, just as it makes greater-than-expected variations fit a metrical pattern.<\/p>\n In issue 84 William Alderson\u2019s \u2018Cheese\u2019 consists of five lines all rhyming with the title. Alan Buckley\u2019s \u2018A Necessary Space\u2019 is in rhyming couplets, a mix of full and half rhyme. Rhyme is not always fixed at line-ends. In Laura Scott\u2019s \u2018Cove\u2019 the first two couplets contain a concentrated mix of full and half rhyme: place \/ base; cove \/ bone \/ curve.\u00a0 And at the start of Nichola Deane\u2019s \u2018When wildness cries I\u2019m home\u2019 there\u2019s moment \/ home \/ stone \/ moon. There are more such chains further down these poems.<\/p>\n When there is end-rhyme, these days it tends to be looser not just in sound but also occurrence: formal schemes such as abab are rare. See the short poems by Miranda Peake and Camino-Victoria Garcia. NB: this works when it\u2019s done well, but not if the reader is left thinking that the writer started off trying to rhyme and then gave up! The above isn\u2019t comprehensive; I started from the back of the magazine and picked, quickly, some poems from the last 20 pages.<\/p>\n I agree that technical poetics aren\u2019t easy, but not that the poems we published will have been easy to write or wouldn\u2019t meet Ted Hughes\u2019 definition. Playing tennis well without a net (Robert Frost\u2019s metaphor for free verse) is difficult. Tone, diction, syntax, vocabulary, line length, line endings, rhyme (if it\u2019s there) and more all have to work harder. The result can be eye-catchingly idiosyncratic as in the intense dialogue in Amy McCauley\u2019s \u2018CaNToS of JoaN\u2019 or in Holly Corfield Carr\u2019s \u2018Caddisfly\u2019 that contains echoes of Geoffrey Hill\u2019s Mercian Hymns both in form and dryness of tone (there\u2019s even a grandmother). Or it can be quiet. The sound each poem leaves in the ear is very different: from Zeina Hashem Beck\u2019s resonant \u2018Ode to my Non-Arabic Lover\u2019 to Raymond Antrobus\u2019 dissonant and almost punctuation-free \u2018What is Impossible\u2019 or Emily Blewitt\u2019s trippingly fast \u2018How to Marry a Welsh Girl\u2019. As Charles Olson said, \u201cFrom the moment he [the poet] ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION\u2014puts himself in the open\u2014he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself\u201d.<\/p>\n Metaphor of course is another tool. Perhaps it\u2019s now less obtrusive and clear-cut. Sometimes the whole poem seems to be a metaphor: William Alderson\u2019s rainbow cheese-wrapping, John Wedgwood Clarke\u2019s \u2018Heap of Doors\u2019 or Cristina Haraba\u2019s \u2018The Master of Sounds\u2019. David Sergeant\u2019s \u2018Dialogue with Tradition\u2019 is full of metaphors and seems to pose a poem-sized then-as-metaphor-for-now question. There are metaphors in Alex Bell\u2019s bravissimo, Joanna Guthrie\u2019s ice-cream-walled \u2018Rock Pool\u2019, Raymond Antrobus\u2019 glowy ceiling stickers and the devastating final box in John Wedgwood Clarke\u2019s \u2018An Education\u2019. Jenna Plewes\u2019 \u2018Smile\u2019 has a single vivid metaphor, the hermit crab, its hiding but also with the nearby word \u201csmash\u201d the vulnerability of its defences. That\u2019s a few poems I picked by opening the magazine at random, when it seemed harder to find poems without than with.<\/p>\n As for poems in the first person, the personal lyric has been with us since Sappho through Catullus, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, Bishop etc and seems none the worse for it… when done well. The \u201cI\u201d in any poem is not necessarily close to the author; it may be a persona, or another speaker, or somewhere in between. All that matters is that the poem makes new \u2013 that it has discovered something for the writer and so is able to touch and startle the reader. But I would like to read more good poems containing politics, climate change, science and space (please, everyone!).<\/p>\n Thanks again. I don\u2019t suppose you\u2019ll agree with all of this, so do come back at us. Anyone else who wants to join in, please do. We\u2019ll put this exchange up on the website so that you can comment there.<\/p>\n Fiona Moore<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In your editorial to Rialto 84 you challenged your readers to challenge you and Fiona. Taking you at your word, here\u2019s my challenge.<\/p>\n Your Editorial vaunts the magazine\u2019s eclecticism. What struck me however was not the wide ranging diversity of the poems in this issue…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4708,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6900,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4706\/revisions\/6900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n London<\/em><\/p>\nAnd A Response<\/h4>\n