Get ready! You're in for it!

So opens a stimulating new anthology of French poetry, Writing the Real, edited by my good friend Dr Nina Parish and her colleague Dr Emma Wagstaff. The words are those of Christian Prigent, whose oblique, surreal, linguistically playful work opens a collection as varied as it challenging. Rather than foregrounding any one tendency, the editors have done a good job of introducing a range of voices that (outside of a few translations through mirco-presses) will be largely unfamiliar to a UK audience. While the experimental end of writing practice is very much the focus here, those experiments are of many different kinds, ranging from the more process-driven approach of Jean-Michel Espitallier ('Tales of up to 15'), or the interrogation of the banalities of everyday language in Christophe Tarkos' poems ('Song 1' and 'Love'), to the New York School-ish work of Stephane Bouquet. Female poets are strongly represented (for example, Anne Portugal and Sabine Macher) and the editors have done an excellent job of providing an introduction that sets the scene and gives us a sense of who the key players are, while at the same time leaving us free to come to our own judgements. Where further translations are available, details are provided to allow us to follow up on other publications by the poets whose work most holds our attention. The translations themselves are by various authors, many of them practicing poets themselves (such as Keston Sutherland), but the texts are presented alongside the original French, which is always a bonus in this sort of edition. Even if our own grasp on the language is not so strong, we can begin to approach the original texts once we have absorbed the translations.
French poetry seeps into the consciousness of UK readers in a fairly sporadic way, driven by the enthusiasm of translators and other advocates for particular authors, so it is a great thing to have this overview of writers whose work might not yet have appeared on our radar. What is most striking about the differences between French writers and UK poets, if this anthology is anything to go by, is the extent to which longer sequences rather than self-contained short poems appear to dominate, alongside a strong tendency towards the prose poem. French poets are clearly working on larger canvasses than many of their UK counterparts, and that alone is a good reason for UK writers and readers to be grateful for this book.
Enitharmon are also to be congratulated on the design on this volume, which looks great!

True confessions

I have recently been reading the work of Danish poet Yahya Hassan, the son of Palestinian refugees, who was jailed in September over the shooting of a 17-year-old boy. Hassan has been a literary sensation in Denmark, selling over 100,000 copies of his book (there's currently no English translation of his work that I am aware of, so I am relying on the German version here).

Hassan writes of a life of brutalization, both by his parents and the Danish authorities, describes what he perceives as the hypocrisy of Danish Muslims, and details his own (sometimes brutal) juvenile crimes. His direct, unflinching poems, written exclusively in capitals with no punctuation, have made him famous, but the financial success they have brought has clearly not allowed him to transcend many of troubles of his early life. Not only that, but he has found himself alienated from elements of his own community, which have reacted angrily to what they perceive as the attacks on them in his work.

Hassan is part of a wider trend in recent years towards a new kind of confessional poetry from previously marginalized voices, speaking uncomfortable truths about violence, discrimination, mental health, illness and disability, addiction, economic disadvantage, and a whole range of other issues. These texts live from their authenticity. The poet does not hold back from revealing painful, even shocking details from their lives: In the case of Hassan's book, there is a particularly disturbing episode where the teenage protagonist assaults and robs a Danish girl who has rejected his sexual advances and racially abused him.

There are, of course, questions to be asked about the construction of such authenticity. Charles Bukowski is arguably the granddaddy of this kind of writing, yet his 'Henry' persona is very much a fictionalized version of his own experience and not to be confused with the writer himself. However, the fate of Hassan, whose welfare and state of mind have increasingly been cause for concern, also leads us to ask moral questions about the audience's role. Hassan's readers may be fascinated by his life-experiences, but is there a danger of that fascination becoming a high-brow version of the gawking at 'car-crash' celebrities we encounter in the tabloid press? Some are beginning to question whether Hassan's publisher had a duty of care to counsel him against revealing certain experiences or expressing certain views, or at least to talk to him about possible consequences.
There are clearly no easy answers here. One might hope that poetry of the kind that Hassan has written will have a therapeutic effect, allowing the writer to deal with their experiences productively and taking on a positive social role in terms of breaking down taboos and encouraging tolerance and change. Clearly, even if those positive social effects are achieved in this case, the writer himself has paid a high price.

Best Blogs of 2016

Matthew Stewart at Rogue Strands has been kind enough to include 'A Thing for Poetry' among his best blogs of 2016. Good to know that the blog is read and appreciated, and also very helpful of Matthew to have provided this excellent list of the best in UK poetry blogging. There are certainly some here I need to explore more thoroughly.