Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2 On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3 A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4 Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations
- 5 Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6 ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy's Différance
- 7 Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8 Living in History
- 9 An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10 Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11 Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2 On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3 A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4 Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations
- 5 Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6 ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy's Différance
- 7 Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8 Living in History
- 9 An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10 Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11 Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Suburbs of dissent
The poets represented in the Bloodaxe New Poetry anthology discussed in the previous chapter lead, one might say, a double life, proclaiming exclusion, marginality and oppositional angst or anger, while benefiting from all the best prizes, grants, sinecures and publishing opportunities. Recalling those reservations of David Simpson cited in Chapter 1, one might suspect that much of this poetry's popularity derives from the way it enables cultured professionals to enjoy the privileges of their class position while feeling self-righteous about the unjust order of things of which they are the beneficiaries. Bad faith, reprehensible in individuals, can, however, produce good poetry, just as, according to Auden, good poets have a weakness for bad puns. The New Poetry editors attempted to justify such a contradiction by speaking of this poetry's postmodern literariness as a form of ‘cultural spoofery’, deploying an over-extended idea of irony to make it appear more radical than in fact it is.
If these poets have anything in common, however, it is not a combative social radicalism but something subtler and more insidiously class-bound. Many of them look to the later, postwar W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice as major influences. Both these poets were beset by a cultural and emotional doubleness, Homi Bhabha's cultural hybridity, an up-to-date variant of Gwynn's ‘spiritual hyphenation’ (see Chapter 1): MacNeice because he was Anglo-Irish, marginalised in both cultures; Auden, selfdubbed a ‘double man’, in part because he lived for most of his life in a world where practising homosexuality was illegal, but primarily because, an essentially English poet, he reinvented himself, but only partially, as an Anglo-American one.
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- Information
- Poetryand Displacement , pp. 173 - 193Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007