How could one not welcome, as Fiona Sampson does (Review, 14 September), the fact that “at long last, diverse voices and experiences are getting a proper hearing” in poetry.
Her views that “new work in every genre is demonstrating impatience with older, static verse forms” and that the “best new writing has a kind of velocity that seems to burst open the traditional idea of single poems pinned and mounted on the page” are more questionable, however.
The idea that only work that pushes boundaries is really worth reading seems troubling. In poems such as Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrestled with and smashed open the sonnet form but, as wonderful and strange as those early sonnets are, can one definitively say they are better, more powerful than The Terrible Sonnets of his final years, in which the conventions of the form reasserted themselves? More sensible, I think, to recognise these poems simply as different. As different as, say, Alice Oswald’s expansive Dart from her first collection of largely single-page poems, The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile (though I like both).
Perhaps the real radicalism in poetry lies in acknowledging and valuing more conservative forms alongside more current examples of resistance. If we are really interested in diversity, that is.
Richard Meier
London
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