FREEZEFRAME: Poetry & Poets / Oxford 2007

by Paul Abbott

Poetry in Oxford is like horseshit on a bridleway: you can’t go anywhere without putting your foot in it. The creative tailback of teenage angst, the nursed ambitions of wannabe aesthetes, a plethora of backbiting Colossi to whom we do or don't look up (McDonald, O’Donoghue, Paulin, Raine, McNeillie, etc) – all these conspire to make Oxford brim with the stuff. It may not be published, yet, or any good, but a lot of people write it: from the secrecy of a laptop to the open mic nights’ risky exhibitionism; from High Verse to the hiphop lyric – and everything in between. In the 21^st century, when prose is King, what’s the point of it all? What’s going on?

The diehard poetry scene in Oxford, like those of crack cocaine or tiddlywinks, suffers and enjoys its own cast of stereotypes. There’s always, for example, a green lynchmob of Freshers who’ve studied Keats at A Level, slightly plagued with archaic diction (‘Fain would I tell thee so…’). There’s the loafish colloquialist, ever threatening to drop out, whose oeuvre’s little but a sordid catalogue of trivial sins (‘I sell bunking schoolkids weed…’). There’s the formal straightlacer, who frowns at anything which doesn’t rhyme (‘I love you, like a Necrophiliac / Loves graveyards, with a spade and Hessian sack’). And with those at least a dozen others: Dr Tryhard McLacktalent; weird foreign bloke; Miss Boohoo-the-sea’s-grey, etc – really too many to list. In the Darwinian struggle to be distinctive, Oxonians reincarnate the same dramatis personae yet and yet again.

However, despite their differences, these piebald allsorts compete for the same goals. The first of these is the Newdigate prize, a big university poetry prize worth several hundred pounds. Alas, whatever prestige it once possessed was at last obliterated in 2006, when a doggerel sequence titled Bee-poems scooped the rollover £700. Since that travesty, Oxonians have focused on different ambitions: securing the editorship of Oxford Poetry, the major yearly antholgy, or the presidency of OUPS, or gunning for the termly Isis Prize. This isn’t a great deal to compete for. But, while the opportunities are rare, so is the talent. Poetry’s a niche pursuit; the smallest of small worlds; cliquey and incestuous. In Oxford, doubly so.

Oxford's famous as being a pressure-cooker for aspirant writers: the list of Names is long as Motion’s memoir; it doesn’t need rehearsing. Suffice it to say, very few Oxonian poets write about Oxford – spires, dreaming or squat, tend to leave notebooks virgin. After all, what does one say about them? They’re just there, that’s it. Like carbon monoxide and the War on Terror. Oxford’s grandiose physical architecture becomes another kind of background noise, which gets tuned out of the creative process. Poems, then, tend to be about people.

Out of such a shambles, however, a few unifying threads can be plucked. What follows is a plot-spoiler. So: anyone who doesn’t want to know the future of poetry, Look away now. The three main unifiers will be: One – journalistic or colloquial diction, a kind of slangy trashtalk which uses ye olde metrics to perform modern speech. Two – exotic characterisation, with revival of the dramatic monologue. Three – miniature plotting, using a poem to narrate a very short story or situation. In other words, it will attempt to be populist and relevant, and to entertain, without losing its integrity as an artform. It is, of course, too early to tell whether this attempt will enjoy even partial success, or simply fizzle off. However, if it does prove junk for history’s scrapheap, for the moment at least, Oxford poetry has a direction in which it wants to go; it has an agenda. This is something it’s lacked for a long time.

[Originally published by The Oxford Student, 22 February 2007]