What's Wrong with Recent Poems?
Dismal profundity;
Melancholy self-satisfaction;
Preening humility;
Condescending appeals for pity;
A lazy attention to detail;
A laboured wringing of great significance from tiny amounts of damp matter;
A social and political gradient of cartoon simplicity, and always viewed from the same perspective (la bas);
Pompous leaning on great names from other countries;
A cheapening of death and disability by over-use;
The weird assumption that dirt, or suffering, or deprivation is news to the reader, to the world of reading;
A monotony of tone, a low drone;
Ambulance-chasing melancholy;
Predatory compassion;
History on the pattern of the Hovis advertisement;
A half-concealed, half-advertised contempt for uneducated family relations in conventional careers;
An obsession with excretion;
Gloating over the deaths of failed lives;
Never less than very important (except when self-consciously eschewing significance in the name of still greater meaning);
Identical emotional material projected onto a little-varying set of props;
Maps, inscriptions, glyphs, decodings, graffiti;
The implication that all the lives depicted would pass away in vain were it not for this poet;
Tension and failure, with compensating joy only in a sordid and polluted form;
Slave romance;
Overburdened childhood vignettes;
Superstitious omni-significance;
Christ! (the poet suffers to save the reader, and are you grateful?);
Illness and insight;
Contempt for health;
Explaining too much lest something fine slips by (the ‘clock on the golden section: ten to three’), or too little lest the vacuity of the situation becomes apparent;
Solipsism;
Objects usually broken and old;
Lassitude, made flesh in the rhythms of the verse (if any);
Insistent demands for attention;
Sensitivity speaking in the language of a dictator;
Tired nihilism;
World-weary knowing all;
Sombre colours of decay enlivened only with flesh tints;
A world in which to flourish is failure; and failure is the sole merit;
Single point perspective;
Hushed tones in church (the world a convenient altar for self-worship);
The easy romance of spatial dislocation (translation; travel);
Overworked thesaurus;
Bleating, but crying wolf;
Sanctity of the sordid;
The authorities are always bullies;
Misery memoir, mirth as contrast only;
Bleeding hearts are worn upon the sleeve this year (and all years);
Moaning;
Brand names, particularly for alcohol;
Curiously irresponsible (no children?);
Jaded;
A supersensitive soul denied better fare;
A ‘prisoner’ begging through imagined bars;
Self-harm;
Disorder preferred;
Litter adored;
Public transport;
And a natural world that achieves reality only through the speaker's gloom.
That's what.