It's been a long-standing ambition of mine to be part of a poetry school (by which I mean, a movement or group such as the Lake Poets, the Pylon Poets, or the Fireside Poets).
I even I had an extended jeu-d'esprit on this blog regarding the Unicorn School of Poetry, which was really just a daydream.
Well, I've finally come up with a serious idea for such a school, and a name for it: Suburban Romanticism. And here is a draft manifesto, which I wrote in collaboration with Dominic N of the Some Definite Service blog.
Suggestions and input are welcome, and anyone wanting to join in this nascent or (pre-nascent) movement is very welcome.
Of course, whenever I write about poetry, I brace myself for the deafening silence. But what can you do? (To be fair, I shared this manifesto on Facebook and, to my surprise and pleasure, there were a few comments.)
1) The Suburban Romantics are on the side of life.
2) The Suburban Romantics favour all the poetic conventions that were the poet's stock-in-trade up to the day before yesterday, especially rhyme and metre.
3) The Suburban Romantics believe that traditional poetic forms (such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ode, the villanelle etc.) are just as valid in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
4) The Suburban Romantics do not agree with Thoreau that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”, or with Wilde that “most people exist, that is all”. We celebrate the routine, the ordinary, the workaday, the familiar.
5) The Suburban Romantics are not afraid of sentimentality or nostalgia, nor are we afraid of challenging or subverting sentimentality or nostalgia.
6) The Suburban Romantics do not genuflect before any transitory socio-political orthodoxies.
7) The Suburban Romantics want to evoke mystery, not practice mystification.
8) The Suburban Romantics are nourished at the wells of myth, legend, archetype, the sacred, the proverbial, the folkloric, the sacramental, and so on.
9) The Suburban Romantics do not disdain the topical, the ephemeral, the colloquial, the commercial, and so on.
10) The Suburban Romantics accept that the great majority of people (and perhaps an ever-increasing majority) are destined to live in suburbs, conurbations, commuter towns, housing estates, and so on. We insist that these can be the subject and setting of poetry; not just the poetry of satire and protest, but the poetry of affirmation and celebration as well. We seek the re-enchantment of the world, the transfiguration of the commonplace.
11) The Suburban Romantics have a special respect for Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, who demonstrated beyond all doubt that traditional forms can be used to explore contemporary life.
12) The Suburban Romantics are quite willing to use irony, but not to live in it as our natural element.
13) Suburban Romanticism is not a straitjacket. We do not preclude forays into free verse, rural themes, bleakness, misanthropy, obscurity, or any of the things against which this manifesto is a riposte. But they should be the exception, not the rule.
Dear Maolsheachlann,
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for this. I am more than happy to describe myself as a Suburban Romantic. Sign me up!
I think there is a profound unspoken need for poetry along these lines. The enduring popularity of Larkin and Betjeman is only one sign of this; more fundamentally it is attuned to the human heart and the love of home.
Dominic
Thanks so much for the comment, Dominic. I'm glad you are willing to be a part of this.
DeleteThe enduring popularity of Larkin and Betjeman, yes, that's one positive sign. Apart from that, right now, I'm feeling pretty dejected about the prospects of any venture like this. Even conservatives don't really care about poetry; I'm getting exhausted banging this drum. It's been so many years! Doubtless I will get over it, but right now I'm just exhausted with trying and being hit with a wall of indifference.
Well, as you know, I share your concerns and am more than aware of the indifference you describe. This is an age of noise and cheap language and short attention-spans, and the slow-burning rewards of poetry are easily overlooked or dismissed. You and I have complained often enough about the poetic establishment, and your poems have been turned down often enough by publications that ought to have known better. So there is a real problem.
DeleteBut we also both believe that poetry answers a deep longing of the human heart. Any well-written poem will easily outlive zany or lime-lit prose, and the atmosphere it creates is both more enduring and more enriching. Consider the prayers at Mass — how refreshing they are — they aren't trying to sell you something, or boss you around, or manipulate you... Not everyone will notice this, but those who do will also be open to authentic poetry, and are quite likely to fall upon it gratefully. Thousands of people subscribed to Malcolm Guite's mailing-list, for instance. Plenty of people will understand exactly what Suburban Romanticism is all about; the problem is reaching them.
Poetry, of course, has to speak for itself. A manifesto is one thing; now to compose the poems themselves!