Wonderings about art especially poetry.

"Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence. "




Been having my about six monthly crisis and doubting about where I've went with my poetry so far and where to go next. It's a regular occurrence.

Right now my thinking is this:-

1. The idea of what poetry is or should do or could be from the period of the romantics e.g. Robert Burns, Wordsworth etc is irrelevant now. I still enjoy it but it's not how poetry should be considered today.

2. Poetry must in 2015 try to be closer to everyday life and it must engage with the times and the world we live in. Some examples of people who have pointed the way include Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Andrea Gibson, Performance poetry in general.

3. Performance poetry seems to me to be the best means by which of spreading ideas, entertaining, shocking, surprising and satirizing. Page poetry can do this too and does. However it is not so confrontational as performance poetry.

4. I've repeatedly said that poetry must shed it's traditional aspects which thankfully is tending to happen with performance poetry. Poetry must stop trying to appeal to often white western middle class academics, it must stop trying to appear apolitical , it should stop trying to avoid being earthy... In essence I'm saying that poetry at times has not moved past previous ideas about itself and about what the role of the poet is.

5. I have always opposed the idea of the poet as removed from society or somehow above it. The poet should be part of society and comment on society for the betterment of society. The poet has to navigate the difficulties of trying to speak about society without trying to speaking for marginalized and oppressed peoples..

Represent without trying to be representative?

How to be profound without being obscure or too abstract?
To be realist or to be postmodernism and risky obscurity?
Is surrealism/DADA doomed to be too obscure?
Is Scots poetry nationalistic as Tom Leonard claims? or is it reclaiming what was repressed? or is it both?
Is Scots poetry failing to communicate and being too obscure?

How to be simple without being simplistic and losing the art of poetry?
Is poetry that everyone could write really such a bad thing?

Is art alienated creativity? (Situationism- Guy Debord) Will Art disappear in a society in which we need to be creative in creating society?? I used to think so but now I'm not convinced.

Does the way poetry tends to be written encouraging it's to be irrelevant to most people?

How to make poetry participatory? (Roland Barthes) Is that even possible( Ken Knabb says it is not)

Must poets as a role within society die for poetry to live?

Can there be any innovation in poetry anymore?




I grew up reading the poetry of the romantics. I will always enjoy it.


Now I like  modernist poetry, postmodernist poetry,Minimalism, Dada poetry, surrealist poetry, Beat Poetry,


Interested in ideas of Roland Barthes and Derrida.

"The reader of a readerly text is largely passive, whereas the person who engages with a writerly text has to make an active effort, and even to re-enact the actions of the writer himself. "- Barthes.




I disagree with New Formalism.


Poets who interest me(in terms of what I want to do with my poetry): Allen Ginsberg,Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Andrea Gibson, Mina Loy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth,Rainer Rike, Irvine Welsh, Tom Leonard(the Glaswegian one), James Kelman(?)


"The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry, in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were generally content to work within that tradition. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. Imagists use free verse."