Best of Scottish

Every year, the Scottish Poetry Library commissions a selection of the best Scottish poems published. The twenty poems selected in 2008 can now be read online here.

The Poetry of Saying

I have just received a copy of The North, a poetry magazine published in the UK. It contains a review by Cliff Yates of a book called "The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000" published by Liverpool University Press. The book discusses the kind of 'underground' or alternative poetry which I mentioned in my previous blog about Joe Ross' book "EQUATIONS=equals". Yates quotes author Robert Sheppard's remark about Tom Raworth:

The poems cohere more by a reading of their formal means than by attempting to chart the semantics of a supposed context, even as readers are drawn into dialogue. The discourses are powerfully questioned and defamiliarized; indeed, the poems may never read the same way twice... They are both empty and full. They turn content into form and turn form into content that is read... they do not have designs on us. We must make designs with them.

It is the last sentence I wanted to draw attention to. This kind of poetry makes great demands on the reader and the poems "may never read the same way twice'. This is because each reader brings their own experience, perhaps of only a few moments earlier, to the interpretation of the poem. The poems contain no 'closure'. They remain open to interpretation.