Poetry as a Game of Cops and Robbers
Here’s a video of 'The Lookout' being performed in puckish, animated fashion by the very lovely Guy Clark. The poem won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize 2018, and is currently available as part of Live Canon’s 2018 Anthology. What follows is an essay that poured out of me intermittently, in stupid little late-night bursts, over the last few weeks whenever I tried to put together a brief background to the poem.
‘The Lookout’ is a poem about a thief keeping vigil, over the street and over his or her state of mind. I say “his or her” because within the text itself, the gender of the thief is ambiguous. That he or she is part of a larger gang is implied but not made explicit.
The poem uses 17th century thieves’ cant to partially disguise its own meaning. It is itself shifty and duplicitous. In reading or listening to it, the reader communes with no real, whole person but a shadowplay, a persona made of stolen and spliced materials. Flesh and blood is temporarily lent to it by Guy in the video. It is a burrow of little deceptions.
The origin of thieves’ cant is not exactly certain. An account by Samuel Rid in Martin Markwell, Beadle of Bridewell claims that Giles Hather and Cock Lorel, “the most notorious knave that ever lived”, met at the Devil’s Arse cavern in Derbyshire, and there devised “a certain kind of language, to the end their cozenings, knaveries and villainies might not so easily be perceived […] And this their language they spun out of three other tongues, viz., Latin, English and Dutch – these three especially, notwithstanding some few words they borrowed of Spanish and French.”
There is a long association between the poet and the low-life, in part because of the poor pay each receives, in part because each is seen to flout the rules of society while contributing little to it. Poetry’s place in Western culture is overshadowed by Plato’s suspicion of poets as “guilty of making the gravest misstatements” and subsequent demand that the defenders of poetry “show not only that she is pleasant but also useful”. The poet is accused of being a dim breed of conman.
This criminal connection is not entirely disparaging, however. Aside from its romantic flavour, it operates as a metaphor – the poet as kleptomaniac pickpocket, gathering and arranging images like jewels. The smuggling of concepts and implications into the body of the poem by means of verbal and semantic association. The transaction with the reader as clandestine meeting. Rampant impersonation – the poem borrowing the dress, bearing and affect of all kinds of arch rhetorical forms, while its major characteristic is to do with tricks performed upon the senses – hoodwinking. Misdirection. Cheap magic.
When Johan Huizinga lists the shifting functions of poetry as “ritual, entertainment, artistry, riddle-making, doctrine, persuasion, sorcery”, or when Umberto Eco defines the poetic effect as “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed”, it recalls scenes from the crime caper series Lupin III where the protagonist removes rubber mask after rubber mask, cycling through identities to dizzying effect.
This in turn reminds us that the chicanery of the poet is a form of play-acting. Just like the rubbery cartoon criminal, they are an agent of disorder – or rather, re-order – whose shapeshifting is an intrinsic part of their function. There may even be more than one of them at work, if the piece is collaborative, or an adaptation or translation.
But the willing collusion of the reader is needed for the trick to work. Because the action of the poem takes place in its own world, it requires someone to step into that world, to accept its conditions. They must go beyond reading or listening and join in the caper, connive with the poem, even drive the getaway car.
The reader who enters the world of the poem will find it considerably more pliant, more turbulent than the external world – more so than any narrative, more than a cartoon. It is one of ‘semantic plenitude’, to borrow a phrase from Philip Wheelwright’s Metaphor and Reality – a living labyrinth, where one thing may stand in place of another, or two things occupy the same space simultaneously. Meaning is always provisional, and the reader may escape through a secret door at any time.
But because the world of the poem unavoidably recalls our world, and because it is consciously navigated, the transformations and elisions within it seep back through the membrane. The reader returns with something – a share of the loot. Poetic language therefore goads us to break with conventional order, to transgress in our thinking. It is fundamentally wayward-leaning, topping up our glass with a wink, however grave the occasion.
In the main, this is to be celebrated. Perhaps the famous Canadian poet Irving Layton intended doing just that when he titled his 1958 poem ‘Whatever else, poetry is freedom’. But the freedom Layton revels in is discomforting: two stanzas into the poem, he appears to casually confess to an act of domestic violence. And this, it transpires, is hardly out of keeping with his reputation.
If the poet is a rogue, they are also a police detective, both within and without the poem. Within the poem, they are ever in pursuit of some quarry and – as the author of the work – imposing a tentative authority upon it. Their play is serious, as all play is to some extent. For Wheelwright, the semantic plenitude of poetry is an effort to properly account for reality as it is perceived, a task for which normal language is hopelessly inadequate. “Reality is coalescent,” he says – a negotiation between the particular and universal. Everyday delineations between things are “a subterfuge of thought”.
In other words, the chicanery of the poet is performed in order to turn up the level of magnification where the commonplace version of reality is zoomed out and fuzzy. It is a branch of forensics.
Meanwhile, outside of the poem, at large in society, the poet is the moral variety of trickster, the wise fool. They feel a duty to maintain and improve the world they live in. They have burdens to discharge and monsters to expel. Poets, we are told, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world – their forerunner is the thulr of Norse literature, orator and keeper of knowledge, who drew on his repository of lore to challenge boastful claims in the court of the king.
But where is the court nowadays? How galling that as legislator, wisdom-seeker and knowledge-keeper, the poet’s instrument of choice – the tool that sits neatly in their grip – the poem – is a thing suited to slippery skulduggery. It dodges and teases, disrupts narrative and logical progression, and requires its audience to act as partner in crime, so that even the most violently potent poem, when aimed at the sceptic, has all the stopping power of a pebble tossed in the path of a tank.
Invoking Layton’s ‘poetry is freedom’, Leonard Cohen said, “I don’t think the poet has a mission. I think that activity more appropriately applies to the priest, the teacher, the politician, and the warrior.” But this is a purist notion of the poet, Len. The human mess of poet is also a priest, teacher, politician or warrior – a crossbreed who mingles poetry with mission. A meddler.
This leads the poet to act as police detective in a third sense: policing themselves and their own. Somehow they must convince a sceptical public and state to give them back their court. They desire influence. They desire stability and standing. Even taking individual poets at their most humble, they want their work to be valued to the extent that it rationalises the effort behind it.
They need to band together, then, operating as a guild or a community, to survive hostile indifference. Members of their profession must double up as both themselves and the representatives of impartial accrediting institutions, to create the impression that there is a civilised order to the production of poetry. Quality control procedures are put in place. Poetry becomes a crop to be cultivated. It is advocated for regularly in the papers. It is administered as a cure and recommended as a health food. It is printed on high quality paper and raised onto a stage at every opportunity. Dense, tangled carpets of hyperbole fill the backs of books.
The scheme is generally successful in convincing some of the public that there are poets who are great and esteemed figures, though by bludgeoning more than persuasion[1]. Many, on the other hand, are alienated by the constant ceremonialising and collective self-importance. There is a conspicuous failure to cajole these readers to engage wholeheartedly with the poem – they continue to stand outside, occasionally prodding with a toe, asking for some empirical evidence as to the nutritional and societal value of this product.
In the meantime, many figures like Layton emerge – imbued with a sense of their own destiny, a sense of the poet as cultural Colossus – and openly engage in narcissistic and misogynistic excess.
Because poetry is now a scene, a culture, an institution, the situation for the individual poet has grown somewhat complex. They have somehow become a resident in a large town populated only by thieves or police detectives. They still intend to perform an outlaw or policing function on the world outside, but they must first contend with the town’s own rules, rituals and religiosity.
Within the town are all the means to have their work legitimised and disseminated. There are exits leading to the stage or the printed page, perhaps even to newspaper reviews. There is remuneration, there are appointments, there are offices. The poet only needs to be authenticated, to have their papers stamped enough times, to find favour among one or two of the various clubs, and then the opportunities multiply.
But the town is in continuous tumult – a range of policymakers thrive within it, often engaging in open warfare with one another. Authority takes the same form it does everywhere else in the world – multitudinous, self-contradictory, variably volatile, precise and imprecise, so that there’s no way to manoeuvre without breaking some rule or other. You must simply choose when and how to disobey, which powers to risk offending.
As the balance shifts between different attitudes of critical accreditation, it becomes difficult to keep the paperwork up-to-date. The red carpet may be suddenly taken from one demographic and laid out in front of another. A poet may spend years or decades amassing the credentials that buy them their passage through one of the town’s gates, only to arrive at the border and find a fresh and seemingly perverse set of documents are required.
An additional complication is that whatever power propels you from the town into the wider world also acts as your spokesperson, and will inevitably have some crude design in mind. For a time, the prevailing scheme was to send poets out into the public as members of a grand dynasty of literature. A narrative arc of English-language poetry was concocted, and those who were lifted onto the stages were introduced as the heirs and inheritors of tradition[2] – at times a fairly brazen attempt to trade on public veneration of the classics, which we know very well has less to do with the exercise of individual judgement than it does fascination with celebrity.
Meanwhile inside the town, everyone’s creative DNA was tested for evidence of lineage – the first port of call in any assessment of talent. This went well for the Oxbridge graduates.
More recently, however, this branding exercise has fallen out of favour – perhaps in part because it cannot produce venerable poets in large quantities, and poetry has become an industry that, like all industries, pursues continuous growth. The emphasis has moved very firmly on to relatability and personal narrative.[3]
The strategy is well-judged: we know the public love a story. They love triumph and tragedy. They love getting the scoop on a person’s private life, and to be treated as confidante. What’s more, poets almost inevitably lean toward the interrogation of intimate matters – their own lives present the most urgent problems and constitute the nearest material to hand.[4] For the purposes of producing poetry in ever-increasing quantities, it’s a bottomless well.
It reaches a stage somewhere between prescription and conscription. Dana Goia, in his introduction to the Best American Poetry 2018, writes: “the essence of poetry is an individual voice speaking to an individual reader”. This is not so much an explanation to readers as it is an instruction to poets to spill and keep spilling. ‘Voice’ means fingerprint, means the means by which you are authenticated[5].
There are now few expectations more insistent than that placed upon the poet writing about their father to include the words “my father”, to collapse all the possibilities of the poem’s semantic galaxy into a single solar system orbiting one unmistakeable glut of subject matter. The poet knows that by omission of those two words they risk being damned as whimsical or obscure, the poem deemed an unnecessary act.
(‘Damned’, because the factionalism within the town means that poets softly savage each other all the time, and because raising one hero aloft seems to require making unflattering comparisons with their contemporaries. The poets with access to the newspapers trade broad swipes, between them making the case that the whole art form is trivial and self-indulgent.
Bad news for those poets who are stranded somewhere in between the limited scope of each faction’s ideals, who may find themselves doubly or triply damned.)
The pull and corral of personal narrative, meanwhile, is bad news for the poet-as-thief. Poetry pairs well with narrative, but also offers an escape from it – a means to confront the most serious issues of grief, inheritance, identity and so on by dissolving their oppressive weight in a super-artifice, or by scattering it across a multitude of imaginary plains. Seriousness arrived at through play – the world of the poem as a forge where one may melt down the old, inhibitive narrative templates and weld together a more open-ended construct.
Or perhaps you thought to drown the ‘self’ in poetry, to flee from your own voice into a polyphony or pattern, use that as your vehicle of exploration. The methods you might employ – collaboration, assemblage, generative sequencing – are marks against you in the realm of individual voices speaking to individual readers. The story you’re pursuing is too new, or it’s too far from the surface. You are to be strapped in to your biography instead.
Or suppose there is some element of your identity that people have always used to trap and skewer you. You may have rightfully imagined that in poetry, identity can be endlessly reconfigured, recharted and refined – only to find that passage out of the town is offered on the condition that this facet of you is sensationalised, sent forth like an emissary.
Even if you’re pleased and prepared for that to be the case, you may then find a facsimile of your identity is sold back to you, or that others look on it, jealously or admiringly, as a kind of clever ploy. They may even convince you, if they hit you hard enough, that it is a clever ploy.
And OK, so all that is irksome about this may pass. But the previous arrangement was no good either, and nor is the inclination, past and present, to reduce poetry to political rhetoric. All of these schemes seem to find their strength in the denial of poetry’s shapeshifting, destabilising, function-evading tendency, denial that the reader must play the poem like a game, or play with it like a toy, to make something happen. In all these formulations, potency resides in the poem like nutrients in a grain, and the poet is the provider.
But this is what happens when the poet pursues an idea of their own authority. And it leads to an abundance of revered figures, some of whom will abuse with impunity. Layton’s reputation was secured by variations on the theme of literary authenticity, both in terms of relatability and familiarity with the canon – and, for what it’s worth, political clout. Poetry is freedom, yes, but when power is situated in the idea of poetry, it sours.
I didn’t, er, set out to write this. Much of the above is, simultaneously, a kind of strange dream that I wish to distance myself from, and variations on thoughts that have distracted me for years. I only intended to write a little background to the poem, explaining how I had actually composed it with the Live Canon competition in mind, had considered the tastes of the judge, Liz Berry, and the fact that an actor would perform the poem if it were shortlisted – all of which helped me shape the thing. Once I’d got a little way in, though, I realised I felt anxious about admitting any of that.
I felt anxious about admitting the fact that ‘The Lookout’ is partially based on a character from a computer game called Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine. This lookout is a Haitian refugee, robbed and displaced in the 1991 coup. “There’s a moral debt that’s owed to me,” she tells Inspector Voltaire in the third act of the game. “The law doesn’t apply until I’m paid back in full.”
I felt anxious about the idea that in playing through Monaco in the role of The Lookout, and in writing something inspired in part by that experience, in part by the character, it might be thought that I was making some kind of fraudulent representation – even though, as far as I’m concerned, the ‘I’ of the poem is me, and her, and a 17th century rogue, and an everyman all at once.
I felt anxious about the fact that ‘The Lookout’ was also a piece of research. I’d intended to completely disguise the fact that it was partially inspired by a character in a computer game, hoping to demonstrate that once any prejudice against the medium is removed, computer games are as fruitful a source of material for poetry as any arena of cultural experience.
Then I remembered I was dogged by similar anxieties during the composition of the poem, and that I am, in fact, dogged in this manner throughout all my composing, and that it has become worse as I’ve aged, as I’ve become attuned to all the different ways that poetry is judged, and the ways it is dismissed, mostly by other poets.
I’ve broken a number of unwritten rules: that poetry ought to be a natural, almost-unwilled expressiveness, uninfluenced by ideas about judges’ tastes[6]. That it ought to be written in and for your own voice. That it should not associate with a low form like computer games, and it should not disguise itself.
(The thieves’ cant is the cause of a three-pronged anxiety. It may be viewed as overly opaque, or as theft of a dialect to which I have no claim, or as an unoriginal stylistic affectation.)
None of these rules are enforced in every place and circumstance, but they are enforced in some places, some of the time, at a varying level of transparency, and so negotiating them is difficult. Together with all the others, they seem to make up a system of tripwires.
I know it doesn’t have to work this way. If you’re lucky, you may be able to drift easily into the graces of one or other presiding authority. Or you may have the serenity of spirit to trust that patience and application will see you through the system eventually. Or you may have such clear and strong ideas about what is right and wrong that you can look on any disagreement contemptuously and barge your way through.
Or you may not need to bother with Poetry Town at all, if you have money and influence, or a bright enough idea. Or you may, in any case, only regard poetry as something to be worn lightly, to be straightened out and draped about the shoulders of some other, truer cause.
You may fluctuate wildly between all these positions and find that it suits you. And once it has all meshed together into a stability of reputation and a certainty of destination, you may choose to be contemptuous of others who find themselves compromised.
I can only say that for me, I find it a tangle – a narrow and well-sentried pass – and the more I read and take in of others’ positions on the matter, the more it is so. Although I write obsessively on serious and personal subjects, I rarely name them directly. I don’t aim to be anyone’s successor, or to be part of some literary pantheon. And I don’t want ‘I/me’ to be at the centre of everything I write.
So I find myself struggling to fulfil the expectations others have of poetry, and unable to maintain my own sense of its justification in the face of all these well-evidenced ideals. This doesn’t just halt me at the point of submitting or publishing; it gets to work at the earliest stage of composition, so that I see immediately, almost before I’ve written anything, the many ways in which it is inadequate.
What’s that really got to do with ‘The Lookout’, which has, after all, won me a competition? It’s just that I came to realise that this is in part what the poem is about. Somewhere in the experience of playing as lookout in a computer game, stowing my impulse to dash for the loot, and in the characterisation of the Lookout as a refugee who says she’s owed a debt, and in the linguistic disguise of thieves’ cant, there was a way toward reflecting how I have felt the need to hide and watch, and watch myself, and see myself as intruder.
I see it as a positive account – an account of what methods remain open to you when all the roads appear blocked. Which is also an account of the instinct for poetry.
But honestly, I only really wanted to make the point, when I started writing this, that a poem is something of a caper. Something like, in fact, a stage from Monaco – where reader and poet are thief and policeman, sometimes chasing one another, sometimes in collusion, sometimes operating independently. Hungry
but not too hungry.
[1] Once critical language has arrived at pronouncing a work “important”, it has given up trying to demonstrate that its subject is enticing or beneficial to the reader in any immediate way, and moved on to coercion as a tactic.
[2] Even as I write this, I’m uncomfortably aware of my inability to reinforce my assertions by reference to this literary figure and that, also of how clumsy it looks on the occasions that I do.
[3] I’m writing about these as if they were carefully devised monolithic approaches, but of course they arise from a mix of idealism, pragmatism and cynicism, driven by different people at different times for differing reasons.
[4] Unambiguously personal subject matter also means the poet is likely to be more protective of and fiercely loyal to the poem, and renders others, in their decency and sensitivity, less eager to issue criticism. It’s striking how often plagiarists will clumsily edit the precise language of the poem they are lifting from, because what they intend to steal is the story and its attendant good will. Thieves stealing from thieves, however, is a completely different essay.
[5] There is a slipperiness of meaning here that can be exploited both ways. ‘Voice’ may of course mean the individual perspective of an artist, as communicated across the entire body of their work, whether they are novelist, photographer or film-maker. It may also be used, as I suspect it is being used here, as a measure of purity.
[6] I’m aware of the irony: that I’m claiming to be constrained from writing to others' tastes because of other other's tastes.
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