Three Americans on Four Englands

Following on from Ben Wilkinson's response to Todd Swift’s ‘Four Englands: Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English,’ which was published in the October issue of Poetry Magazine and on their website, I thought it’d be interesting to pull in a few American voices on the article. Please feel free to add your own to the chorus. 

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Lawrence Eby

Well, the article is pretty thorough. It gave me a good sense of some of the drama surrounding the scene and a bit of its history, as well as its contemporary triumphs. It made me curious of these four poets, so it does its job well as an article. 

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Kevin Riel

Well, my first thought is I would really like to get my hands on James Brooke's book. My second is that the review overall seemed fairly banal and hapless, seemed to make its case as if no one had written poetry in the UK since WWII except Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. Overall, it seemed to oversimplify these poets' influences—literary, cultural, historical, and otherwise. Exhibit A: 

“It all comes down to a certain kind of English xenophobic suspicion on the parts of some critics, readers, and writers, that English poetry was only ruined when it came into contact with European and American modernism in the twentieth century … a puritanism that wants poems simple, plain, and as undemanding as take-it-or-leave-it Church of England fetes.”

This statement seemed ridiculous to me. It's the old line that British critics and intellectuals are a lot of crotchety pedants besotted with pride and nostalgia for the country's Victorian, Romantic, and Elizabethan heydays. From my experience as a student at the University of Sussex for a year, the academic establishment in the UK is lively, radical, internationalist, and completely engaged with contemporary currents across all disciplines. A good deal more than anything I’ve encountered in the US. 

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Shondra Rogers

First off, this ... has minimized Mort into a singsongy poet with nice rhyme and simple narrative. Clearly he’s incorrect in the notion that she falls into the trope of duality as a one-trick pony as well. He obsesses over her drinking aspect, but my assumption would be that this is mainly due to his clearly masculine reading of the text. Further, he takes the Plath approach [and] that’s all too overdone: that she was nothing more than a confessional poet. He suggests that Berry has channeled her simply because her poems are emotional in tone, [which] again seems like a masculine paradigm that he's dug himself into. As an American reader I take into the text with me preconceived and often false notions of English life, which happen to include things such as an obsession with tea, and he does quite well to harp on this in British poets to the point that it’s more detrimental to the portrayal of British poets than beneficial. Also, for someone who knows English lit so poignantly, I find it disappointing that he only mentions Keats in the context of being a poet, being English, and being a Romantic. Superficial read[ings] if you ask me.

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Despite criticism similar to that expressed above Swift said he saw no reason to respond stating, in similar words to Lawrence Eby, that “[the article] is meant to be an open door, inviting American readers (and beyond) to begin to read younger British poets. It has done that, and so succeeds." 

When asked for a response Helen Mort replied with the common-sense view “I think it's a good thing if an American readership is made aware of British poets through a review and hopefully some readers might seek the books out for themselves and form their own opinions." Judging from the three American voices reported here that would already seem to be the case.