Which way did that zeitgeist go?
Jul. 4th, 2010 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughThere are fashions in writing; there always have been, and being in tune with them does sometimes make odds to one's chances of publication. For instance, the Holy Grail for some publishers, both in prose and poetry, has lately been to find young, male writers who concentrate on urban settings and "gritty" themes. (I assume this is in order to appeal to young male readers, though since by far the most novels are bought by women, it would seem a strange marketing strategy to ignore the likely buyers and focus on the unlikely ones.) In poetry especially, it has been fashionable to dismiss anything with a rural setting or preoccupations on the ground that most readers live in towns and want to see their own background reflected in what they read (yes, that would make the popularity of fantasy and histfic inexplicable, but I guess that just underlines the way that for the litfic establishment, Genre Doesn't Count). Poets have long been accused of concentrating on nightingales and seascapes and ignoring "real life". Rural isn't contemporary.
Though I've always thought this a bit daft, it never actually affected me before, because I was by nature very urban, my curiosity directed more towards people than places, and that reflected in my writing.
Well I moved, didn't I, and not just to a village rather than a town. I now live in a place where the landscape is far harder to ignore than it ever was in Cardiff, and which changes far more with weather and seasons. In a town, weather makes little odds. If it's sunny, you can walk where you were going, if it rains, snows or blows a gale you take a bus. Up here, though the shop is only half a mile away, there's literally no shelter on the way, so if it rains you think twice about going at all. Conversely, if it's clear and bright it can take half an hour to get there, because the temptation to just stand and gaze at the surroundings is so great. I can't drive; those who go everywhere in personalised metal boxes will have to take my word for it that weather can be incredibly sudden and various. Being near the coast, we get sea mists that blank everything out; when it suddenly returns, you get a terrific sense of what has been missing.
Above all, the lack of trees, tower blocks and, outside Lerwick and Scalloway, any concentrations of building, create a huge sense of space. Big sky, that stretches uninterrupted as far as eyes can see in any direction, is remarkably hard to absorb and get used to. I wrote a poem about it recently in which I said
And living in a place where landscape is so overwhelming does slightly alter your view of those small figures in the painting. In a miniature portrait, the figure is all; in a vast landscape, they look more insignificant, just another part of the picture. There are many people, including Muslims, who think Islam forbids the depiction of human or animal figures in painting - the Taliban ignoramuses charged through Afghan museums destroying paintings that showed such figures. In fact this is baloney; mediaeval Muslim art is full of intricately painted human and animal figures, for they were never proscribed as part of scenes where they would naturally appear. What was frowned on was portraiture, the depiction of an uncontextualized figure as if it existed alone in the universe, not as part of it.
I like portraiture and would not be without it, but I do, sort of, see what the divines were getting at and why they might have thought it unhealthy for people to see themselves like that. I can see it even more in the context of poetry, where the equivalent of portraiture would be the highly personal, confessional poem (often also a shouty look-at-me-suffering poem). I think there was, until some time in the last century, a divide between folk poetry, which has always been personal in nature, and what might be called public poetry, written and published, which used to think it should deal with more public and universal concerns. I'm not sure when it too went personal (and anecdotal) but one effect of that was to make it very difficult to write about public events, as for instance the Laureate is meant to, without sounding vaguely old-fashioned and embarrassing.
Anyway, all this wittering was brought on by reading a really quite useful guide to writers from a magazine editor, in which he warned rightly that some themes or settings do crop up again and again in submissions. He mentions "observations on nature, [...] feelings of spirituality triggered by views of the sea", which reminded me of Peter Sansom's not entirely serious list of words to avoid in poems; one of them was "seagull".
Well, I hope I don't get many feelings of spirituality, but I do live by the sea and can't avoid seeing it as I write. And I could call the seagulls "maas" up here, but they're still gulls, and recently found their way into a poem I wrote. As it happens, it concerned the death of a person, but looking at it, I can see that it was in a wider context than I might have written it back in Cardiff. Landscape seems more important to me now, and people and cities both smaller, part of a picture the size of a gallery wall. Don't know that I can do much about that...
Though I've always thought this a bit daft, it never actually affected me before, because I was by nature very urban, my curiosity directed more towards people than places, and that reflected in my writing.
Well I moved, didn't I, and not just to a village rather than a town. I now live in a place where the landscape is far harder to ignore than it ever was in Cardiff, and which changes far more with weather and seasons. In a town, weather makes little odds. If it's sunny, you can walk where you were going, if it rains, snows or blows a gale you take a bus. Up here, though the shop is only half a mile away, there's literally no shelter on the way, so if it rains you think twice about going at all. Conversely, if it's clear and bright it can take half an hour to get there, because the temptation to just stand and gaze at the surroundings is so great. I can't drive; those who go everywhere in personalised metal boxes will have to take my word for it that weather can be incredibly sudden and various. Being near the coast, we get sea mists that blank everything out; when it suddenly returns, you get a terrific sense of what has been missing.
Above all, the lack of trees, tower blocks and, outside Lerwick and Scalloway, any concentrations of building, create a huge sense of space. Big sky, that stretches uninterrupted as far as eyes can see in any direction, is remarkably hard to absorb and get used to. I wrote a poem about it recently in which I said
It is as if,
having lived all your life in the jewelled oval
of a miniature, you stepped into a frame
the size of a gallery wall, a landscape
where a few small figures, lost against distance,
seem to be looking for the way out.
(From "Big Sky", published in Poetry Scotland no 64)
And living in a place where landscape is so overwhelming does slightly alter your view of those small figures in the painting. In a miniature portrait, the figure is all; in a vast landscape, they look more insignificant, just another part of the picture. There are many people, including Muslims, who think Islam forbids the depiction of human or animal figures in painting - the Taliban ignoramuses charged through Afghan museums destroying paintings that showed such figures. In fact this is baloney; mediaeval Muslim art is full of intricately painted human and animal figures, for they were never proscribed as part of scenes where they would naturally appear. What was frowned on was portraiture, the depiction of an uncontextualized figure as if it existed alone in the universe, not as part of it.
I like portraiture and would not be without it, but I do, sort of, see what the divines were getting at and why they might have thought it unhealthy for people to see themselves like that. I can see it even more in the context of poetry, where the equivalent of portraiture would be the highly personal, confessional poem (often also a shouty look-at-me-suffering poem). I think there was, until some time in the last century, a divide between folk poetry, which has always been personal in nature, and what might be called public poetry, written and published, which used to think it should deal with more public and universal concerns. I'm not sure when it too went personal (and anecdotal) but one effect of that was to make it very difficult to write about public events, as for instance the Laureate is meant to, without sounding vaguely old-fashioned and embarrassing.
Anyway, all this wittering was brought on by reading a really quite useful guide to writers from a magazine editor, in which he warned rightly that some themes or settings do crop up again and again in submissions. He mentions "observations on nature, [...] feelings of spirituality triggered by views of the sea", which reminded me of Peter Sansom's not entirely serious list of words to avoid in poems; one of them was "seagull".
Well, I hope I don't get many feelings of spirituality, but I do live by the sea and can't avoid seeing it as I write. And I could call the seagulls "maas" up here, but they're still gulls, and recently found their way into a poem I wrote. As it happens, it concerned the death of a person, but looking at it, I can see that it was in a wider context than I might have written it back in Cardiff. Landscape seems more important to me now, and people and cities both smaller, part of a picture the size of a gallery wall. Don't know that I can do much about that...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 02:10 pm (UTC)And thanks for the witter.
Geraldine
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 03:14 pm (UTC)Geraldine
Do you miss trees?
Young, male, urban
Date: 2010-07-05 05:56 pm (UTC)Re: Young, male, urban
Date: 2010-07-06 06:36 am (UTC)