Hell hath no fury like a writer scorned ... Dead Pens, an artwork by Richard Turley. Photograph: Graham Turner/Getty
Literary types - what are they like, eh? You turn your back for five minutes and they're stepping outside to verbally knock ten shades of bejesus out of each other. If it's not Salman and Germaine snarling and sniping in the broadsheets over Monica Ali's Brick Lane (and other grievances), it's Terry putting the boot into Martin, in a spat that had John Sutherland sagely shaking his head and predicting, "The shit will keep on swirling yet awhile." And you have to keep an eye on the likes of Christopher Hitchens, ready and poised to bitch-slap any uppity audience members at literary festivals, armed only with atticism and attitude.
One much less reported literary ding-dong caught my eye recently. What interested me about Todd Swift's and Sean Bonney's spat on Swift's Eyewear blog is that it wasn't an old codgers' hurrumphing fest (no offence meant to any of the above). It was young literary bucks taking the gloves off and going some rounds...
Bonney on Swift: "I do always read your blog, and have at times wondered if you are some kind of fictional character, pompous, essentially dim, but in your imagination the James Bond of a poetry world that is simply too ungracious to recognise your genius."
Kerchung!
Swift on Bonney: "I'd leave this as 'no comment required' - but these comments show the level of malevolence that is generated from the conflictual system at play in British poetry... Eyewear, isn't, of course, James Bond - that honour currently goes to Daniel Craig."
Ohhhhhhh!
Of course it's great fun to be a fly on the blogosphere wall when such verbal fisticuffs are in flow. But what grabbed my imagination about this spat, and why I think it is worth paying some attention to, is what the protagonists are trying to hammer out. The crux of the matter is what constitutes radical poetry today. Both try and claim the "more radical than thou" ground. Swift, taking his cue from Madonna, "strikes a pose" in postmodernist style (is it me or does Madonna seem omnipresent in discussions about postmodernism?), arguing for "a genuinely radical postmodern poetics". This involves breaking formal barriers, requisitioning pop-culture techniques such as "mash-up" and using then to produce a postmodern poetry that gives us "resistance-as-fun".
Bonney is having none of it. His beef is about "real political commitment" and the continued "antagonism between radical and conservative aesthetics". Bonney, you see, "is really on the left" and thinks Swift is painfully mainstream in his postmodern potterings: "Radical poetry right now" is "youthful, excited, and yes, fun. But the problem with that 'fun' for you I guess is that it ... engages with a non-mainstream pop-culture: underground, noisy, argumentative and not particularly interested in boring capitalist has-beens like Madonna" (what is it with that woman?)
Praise the gods - this is exactly the kind of literary spat we need to be having: a clash of ideas coming from people living and breathing poetry. Only problem is both Swift and Bonney are wrong and I would dearly love to pummel the pair of them with a few poetic and political truths of my own. No time like the present I guess...
Todd, please, take my advice - step away from the theoretical, postmodern jargonese. The description of "a Cambridge school of austere poetics" as "resistant to postmodern techno-cultural engagement" is the sort of postgraduate seminar speak that makes me want to grit my teeth and blurt out "Come again love?". Linguistic pontificating does not maketh the radical poet or the radical critic or the radical anything else. Poetry, when it really matters, makes us pay attention. If poetry has that urgency then bunging a bit of Public Enemy or Lyotard into your sestet for the sake of it makes not one iota of a difference.
As for Sean, well he seems to have gone and got himself confused between the avant garde and the vanguard. I've said it before and I'll say it again ... and again. Poetry is not politics. If you think that poetry is in some way a political force, fighting the good fight against the "imperialistic, racist and very boringly misogynistic" you are labouring under one hell of a delusion. I am politically committed and I care about poetry. But they are different things and no amount of radical posturing - poetic, mainstream, underground or otherwise - will change that.
Nevertheless I think both these poets - although they are wrong - are having an argument we should all get stuck into. And if they want to disagree with me, well lads, you know where to find me.
