Poetry and Facebook are my favourite odd-couple.
Coming back from a school-trip to Spain yesterday, I knew that if I logged onto Facebook then I would find the aftermath of one literary slinging match or another, and alas, I did. In this case it was the poet, Angela Readman licking her wounds over a negative comment she received in the discussion of this article. For Readman’s public retort, see here.
Nobody could have predicted what a profound effect Facebook would have on the world of poetry. Well, in fact, we could have. Let me show you a small diagram that I have put together to illustrate the 4 most important locations in the world of business:
These four locations serve a valuable purpose in the world of work. Allow me to illustrate:
Water-Cooler
You may refer to this as the ‘staff-room’ or the ‘common-room’ or perhaps the ‘down-time lounge’ if you work for an odious ‘2.0’ type of company. Basically, this is the place where you make strained conversation with other colleagues and swap grievances about certain clients you have or maybe swap stresses over certain deadlines you may have to meet. Everyone goes to the Water-Cooler at some point, and whilst some feel more comfortable there than others, it is a safe place where you can converse with colleagues in a civilised, professional way.
The Bar
Not everyone goes to the bar, but it is an important after-work institution. You want to bitch about Pat nabbing the Henderson account? Or you want to ask who the fuck Debbie Hitchens thinks she is, planning the AGM without consulting finance? Or you simply want to have a chat with a few like-minded, similar-aged colleagues about who at the office you would most like to ‘do’. The bar is your friend. Leave your political correctness at the door, and let the banter flow. There are no taboos at the bar and you can get as drunk and as objectionable as you like, just as long as you turn up to work on time and do your job well.
Home
Good old dependable home. You can speak your mind here, at home. Your family want you to do well. You can put your feet up by the fire and think about other things. Rent a movie perhaps. Eat a pretzel. You’d rather not talk about work, would you?
Workstation
This being the place where you, um, ya know, do your god-damn job.
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So… what has that got to do with poetry?
The gift and the curse of poetry is that it does not conform to the business model. There is no steady dependable revenue, there is no ‘Poetry - AGM’, no clearly, transparently modelled hierarchy in which people have to directly answer to other people – although it is there somewhere in various smoke-filled rooms.
Most importantly though – poetry does not have the ‘4 important locations’ in the same way that your average 9-5 job will. If anything, poetry has moved to a model where the ‘4 important locations’ are all boiled down to one location – the workstation.
The computer has now become the poet’s main instrument for networking, building profile, bitching about the industry, promotion and networking. The psychological effect of this is that it turns our hands towards anything but poetry when we sit down to the keyboard – the mind can be a lazy bastard at times and it would much rather mooch around bitching about anthologies and prizes than writing the next Paradise Lost.
We also have the danger that poets, by virtue of what they do, over-analyse everything. No poet worth their salt will include a single word or phrase in a poem that they have not considered the various interpretations of. When we combine this with the conversational, half-hearted way with which most of us censor our textual output on the web, especially something as seemingly ‘fraternal’ as facebook, you can see where the egos start bruising and the issues start ballooning.
At the same time, poetry has needed facebook for a long time. It is a highly disparate, isolated profession and I am glad that poets now have the means to pool their efforts more effectively. So, to end on a high note, I want to give two of my favourite things to come from poetry and Facebook existing side by side:
Live events:
I think I must have been to about 20 live poetry readings which I found out about entirely through Facebook. Think about that. I quite enjoy poetry… I have a little click around ‘upcoming events’ and find that there is a poetry reading going on within an hour of my house tonight. I go there, meet some interesting people, maybe buy a book or two. Thanks facebook!
Debates:
Roddy Lumsden is particularly good at sparking these off with his status updates… he is known to get people from all over the country throwing in their 2-pence about the publishing industry, review-writing, autism, music, religion and sex-education. These long, often argumentative, threads between large groups of people from poetry-world are one of the greatest illustrations of what Facebook can be good for… to get people thinking.
Phil Brown
Poetry Editor
Poetry Editor
