My copy of Tom Raworth’s Collected came straight from Carcanet, which tucked in a bookmark that was, as these things often enough are these days, an advertisement for another poet, one Sophie Hannah. It includes, on one side, a head shot of the poet and a poem printed in red type, whose title (presented rather as though it were a footnote) is “Occupational Hazard”:

He has slept with accountants and brokers,

With a cowgirl (well, someone from Healds).

He has slept with non-smokers and smokers

In commercial and cultural fields.

He has slept with book-sellers, book-binders,

Slept with auditors, florists, Pas,

Child psychologists, even child minders,

With directors of firms and of plays.

He has slept with the stupid and clever.

He has slept with the rich and the poor

But he sadly admits that he’s never

Slept with a poet before.

Real poets are rare, he confesses,

While it’s easier to find a cashier.

So I give him some poets’ addresses

And consider a change of career.

Positioned directly below the photograph, head tilted slightly, hair frizzed & over-sized round glasses, the poem is virtually an invitation (if not an incitement) to imagine what it would be like sleeping with Sophie Hannah, all sort of a curious soft porn approach to promoting the lightest of light verse. The photo apparently is the official Sophie Hannah PR shot. A cropped version of it appears on her page at the Contemporary Writers site linked at the top of this blog and the full version can be found on Hannah’s page at her agent’s site. Yep, this poet has an agent, as well as a long list of books for somebody born in 1971, including fiction & children’s literature as well as light verse. The flip side of the Carcanet bookmark contains quotes about her work, positioned next to thumbnail versions of the covers of three of her collections of verse. One, credited to the Poetry Review, declares “Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS.” Another, credited only to the Independent, says simply, “The brightest young star in British Poetry” (caps in the original).

Sleeping with Sophie Hannah is apparently a theme. Googling around the web, I quickly found a site for one of her books that prints two poems, one of which announces

I, therefore, will expect

Full details of our sex life in the Sun.

I will not sue you nor will I object

In any way – I’ll treat it as good fun.

Like “Occupational Hazard,” these works are rather long walks off short piers – a lot of verbiage & metrical padding given over to what are really one-line jokes. If these are signs of the “brightest young star in British Poetry,” then Benny Hill is Potemkin. If you want to take “Occupational Hazards” seriously as poetry, then you have to start asking questions like, why aren’t we told anything about what “he” does, or what the value of such plodding form brings to the occasion. You have to start treating decadence seriously, literally to explore the pathology at the heart of this work.

A few days before Edward Hirsch profiled Wendy Cope in yesterday’s Washington Post column*, Nate Dorward asked me about the inroads that British new formalism is making in the United States – you are hereby put on notice that someday soon we are likely to be seeing & hearing more from Ms. Hannah on this side of the water. The answer I think lies less in the poetry of those small islands off the coast of Europe than it does in a parallel phenomenon, the concept of amateurism in sports. Amateurism, you will recall, came seriously into being in the 19^th century as a means of keeping the unwashed classes from competing with the neo-macho boys of the elite. The poor could not devote the time needed to train & prepare without support, so the dividing line conveniently kept them out without claiming that this was its true purpose.** Every time I hear of some violation of the amateur rules of college basketball, for example, I think back on what amateurism has always been all about – setting up false boundaries to keep certain folks out.

The idea of treating a Sophie Hannah or Glyn Maxwell or Michael Hulse as though they were serious writers – let alone “bright young stars” – functions in a similar fashion. Claims as outlandish as that involve a willful forgetting. It’s a mechanism for acting as if the likes of a Tom Raworth (or any of a hundred other British poets) doesn’t exist. It’s very much like the newspapers that only review poetry volumes from the same three or four trade publishers & the “prestigious awards” that do likewise.

One sees this behavior in the United States rather often around Boston, although there are outposts here & there wherever bad poetry is sold. I suspect that there must be people up there who still adhere to the root word lurking behind the concept “New England” & who live in perpetual fear that the world will someday discover that the major Boston poet of the 20^th century was Bill Corbett. As indeed it was, unless you want to make a case for John Wieners.

I think that the welcome the British “new gen” poets receive – I tend to think of them instead as “funny formalism” – has a great deal to do with how little good poetry is coming out of its equivalent strain here in the States. So rather than look at genuinely witty writers – Frank O’Hara, Anselm Hollo or whomever – these “amateurs” of Official Verse Culture import second rate material whose only true value is that it extends a British tradition its advocates would like to endorse & encourage. Only they have to pretend that it’s not moribund in order to make their case.

That a Sophie Hannah bookmark should be tucked into a volume of Tom Raworth underscores the fact that Carcanet has been publishing her work since her early twenties, while it has only now deemed to incorporate Raworth’s work into its list, part of the process of legitimating its claim to represent poetry, rather than being what the trade publishing scene appears to be in the U.K. as well as the U.S., just another small press scene, but with great distribution. I certainly don’t fault Raworth any more than I do Ginsberg, Koch or Ashbery for choosing distribution, knowing as they do its limits & compromises. Indeed, one wonders if a Jimmy Schuyler would ever have met with the public recognition he was accorded had all his books been published, say, by Black Sparrow or Adventures in Poetry. It makes one wish that FSG would bring out a big Corbett volume, for example, just to see what it would be like for a trade publisher to print good poetry from Boston.

* The only poet reviewed in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review was a collection of work by James Merrill edited by J.D. McClatchy.

** Rather the way W “promotes” diversity while attacking affirmative action & appointing racist judges, & “promotes” health care reform while cutting benefits for seniors & protecting the insurance & pharmaceutical conglomerates