I Hate You!

Ad hominem attacks are the best way to camouflage one’s own weakness, and thus a favourite with intellectuals. Too busy wiping the spit from your eye you do not notice the missing buttons; the cigarette burns on the curry-stained trousers.

Graeme Richardson’s article on modern poetry is an attempt to understand it. This poetry, mostly written in the academy, is a fortified island to the world at large; and like all closed communities and religious cults revels in its strangeness; its distance from the ordinary public:

a focus on or acute awareness of poetry as concerned with the process of perception/consciousness/putting into language, rather than on what is perceived or experienced – hence phrases like language-centred or reflective, and hence too accusations of "difficulty" or "elitism"…

and support now within a small but not insubstantial number of University Departments (including creative writing programmes) – making it with this incipient institutionalisation a post avant-garde. (modernpoetry.org.uk.)


This is often heightened by weird ritual and unearthly language. For the outsider, allowed brief access to these territories, an obvious question is: do their ideas, the words they use, have any intrinsic sense; do they have value? This can be hard to answer.

Richardson’s article, if I read it right, offers a tentative yes to that question; but is judicious in its distinctions: they may be much that is poor and empty; of advertising bills sold as Tennyson.

Within that article the author identifies a reason (almost certainly true) for the current vogue for complexity and ambiguity in modern poetry – the academy. In a letter to the TLS (21/05/2010) Michael Dickman lambasts Richardson… for what we’re not quite sure, though “there is much to take issue with.” One suspects he doesn't like the perceived attacks on academic poetry. Whatever the reason, the rage is more palpable than the sense...

He attacks him for mentioning an aggressive and unsympathetic critic, William Logan, and for suggesting that descriptions of certain experiences and states of mind might be better done more simply, in other styles, like fiction or journalism. “There is much to take to issue with”, yet he concentrates on these!

There are three personal attacks in this short letter. The first – Richardson should “hire Logan full time.” Two ad hominems in one hit! While the other two accuse him of being soft on complexity, “a terrible position for an educator”, and suggests he should “review picture books.”

The attacks are interesting. The first conflates a particular criticism – is this type of poetry the best way of dealing with certain modes of existence – with a cosmic idea: universities should deal with complexities. Really? Isn’t it rather, that there is a certain tendency in the academy to generate complexity? To make the simple hard. Here, the letter writer is simply stating an assumption that is built into these organisations. And confirms the author’s original point! That poetry has been transformed into an academic language. To speak like an academic: we uncover the institutional unconscious in his performance.

The second attack shows the contempt of the initiate for the unbeliever. Like all cult followers the nuance, the single case, the particular is transformed into the universal, the cosmic, the World Revolution: “Should everything be easy?” What a wonderful gob of spit that is!

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