
And their gatherings look audienced with the converted gullible" – Phil Weir
Very different poets, apparently very different people – I wonder exactly what sort of relationship existed between Allen Ginsberg and WH Auden. Neither is among my favourite poets of the 20th century, though both produced a good deal of interesting material. One reported exchange between them comes fairly often to my mind, though. I’m relying here on memory, so undoubtedly paraphrasing, but I like to imagine the conversation going something like this:
Ginsberg (earnest but eager): I always try to write at least one poem a day.
Auden (raising a single eyebrow): Every day? Don’t you think one a month would be quite enough?
Is the urbane Brit-American offering a comment here on the quality of the excitable Greenwich Villager’s writing or on his own more reserved, more considered method? Both, I suspect. But whatever the subtext, it raises the interesting question – one to which there is obviously no single or right answer – of how much poetry it is appropriate to produce.
It must be about a year since I last bumped into that fine poet Peter Hughes – some of whose work, among the remarkable amount he has been producing, I’m delighted to present here. Among other chat, he asked me, as poets will, whether I’d been writing. And the answer was no, I hadn’t. At least, not poetry. Not since putting the finishing touches to my book Life Has Become More Cheerful, which was then awaiting publication after a long gestation. And now … one poem a month? One a year would seem reasonable.
And when (if?) it appears, how might it be recognised as a poem?
Another writer confessed to me that a piece you can find here in Molly Bloom had been “a bit too confusing for some rival organs”. More fool those organs’ editors, I say, for failing to recognise what to me is an essential truth: if it ain’t even a bit confusing, it ain’t really poetry.
This sense of confusion as a required component, however, in no way contradicts or detracts from the essentially political nature of the most valuable writing (here). It is, in fact, an essential element of it. I’m sure Ginsberg and Auden would both agree with that. In their different ways.
Aidan Semmens, editor, May 2018
Very different poets, apparently very different people – I wonder exactly what sort of relationship existed between Allen Ginsberg and WH Auden. Neither is among my favourite poets of the 20th century, though both produced a good deal of interesting material. One reported exchange between them comes fairly often to my mind, though. I’m relying here on memory, so undoubtedly paraphrasing, but I like to imagine the conversation going something like this:
Ginsberg (earnest but eager): I always try to write at least one poem a day.
Auden (raising a single eyebrow): Every day? Don’t you think one a month would be quite enough?
Is the urbane Brit-American offering a comment here on the quality of the excitable Greenwich Villager’s writing or on his own more reserved, more considered method? Both, I suspect. But whatever the subtext, it raises the interesting question – one to which there is obviously no single or right answer – of how much poetry it is appropriate to produce.
It must be about a year since I last bumped into that fine poet Peter Hughes – some of whose work, among the remarkable amount he has been producing, I’m delighted to present here. Among other chat, he asked me, as poets will, whether I’d been writing. And the answer was no, I hadn’t. At least, not poetry. Not since putting the finishing touches to my book Life Has Become More Cheerful, which was then awaiting publication after a long gestation. And now … one poem a month? One a year would seem reasonable.
And when (if?) it appears, how might it be recognised as a poem?
Another writer confessed to me that a piece you can find here in Molly Bloom had been “a bit too confusing for some rival organs”. More fool those organs’ editors, I say, for failing to recognise what to me is an essential truth: if it ain’t even a bit confusing, it ain’t really poetry.
This sense of confusion as a required component, however, in no way contradicts or detracts from the essentially political nature of the most valuable writing (here). It is, in fact, an essential element of it. I’m sure Ginsberg and Auden would both agree with that. In their different ways.
Aidan Semmens, editor, May 2018
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever – Auden
If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything – Ginsberg
If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything – Ginsberg