Within The Rules

I generally loathe and detest adverts, seeing them as theft of my life, time and attention and do my best to avoid them whenever possible. However, over at The Grauniad’s media site, a few days ago, I came across this, which for an article about advertising is quite interesting.

On display - and in some cases for sale - is the original artwork behind the Silk Cut ads showing subtle rips in opulent fabric; or the carefully sculpted quiff atop a pint of Boddingtons; or a thousand ants clambering uphill carrying a vast box of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Somewhere between pop art and Damien Hirst, the best fun to be had in the art world was making ads for the British public.

And then you notice another thing - almost all the brands producing this mad, surreal work were facing heavy restrictions on what their advertising could actually say.

[I always had a bit of a soft spot for this one, back in the days I used to frequent the cinema. Ironic really as in those days – when I was a smoker – I would rather go without than light up a B&H, if ever offered one.]

Certainly if some advertising can be called an art, then pieces such as these would be strong contenders for such. Actually, there is another argument that can be brought up here about whether the intended purpose for a piece in some way can prohibit it from being classed as art. For example, much of what we now consider as art was often in the past commissioned for specific, and sometimes functional, reasons. If, say, Bach’s religious music, commissioned by the church, Shakespeare’s plays he wrote to entertain royalty, various portraits and other commissioned paintings, can all now be called art, then why can’t work produced for advertising, commissioned by modern companies also be considered as such?

However, what interests me currently is this idea put forward in the piece about advertising: Can confining, limiting the artistic imagination* produce better** work when limited by rules and other formal considerations?

If we are to allow that some works of popular culture can be works of art, and it would be anti-elitist not too - rather than elitist, because anti-elitism denies that some things (even in popular culture) are better than other things – then these adverts can be called art. Funnily enough, though, it is because they only seem to have a tangential relationship with the product they are – supposedly – advertising that takes them out of the mundane and gives them a status as artworks, because art is always about that one step that takes it beyond the ordinary, the mundane.

I have been thinking about this on and off for a while in relation to poetry. I started out distrusting the formal types of poetry, feeling like so many contemporary poets from, say, around the middle of the 20^th Century*** onwards than form and structure in poetry was an old fashioned and outdated contrivance; feeling the freer, looser, modern sort of poetry has the page, has recording, where the aide-memoirs of formalism are no longer necessary. Alongside that there is also the feeling that the ubiquitous pop songs, greeting cards, advertising jingles etc that bombard us every day have worn out the power of rhyme – even if only of the moon/June form. It makes rhyme now a cliché, and so is the very opposite of poetry, which is about making it new. However, within poetry there is still be room for those other sorts of rhyme - assonance, consonance etc, which this popular verse making – for want of a better description – does not tend to use.

Having said that, though, there are still those using rhymed verse in the pop song who can still make it (sound) new. People like Dylan (obviously), Leonard Cohen (who, of course, started out as a poet), Elvis Costello, Lloyd Cole, Tom Waits and many others have shown what can be achieved within the traditional pop song form, quite often without descending into self-parody or the overly trite of so much pop and rock. (There is also performance poetry that works best with the aural aids of rhyme, rhythm, and metre, of course.)

I am still nervous about calling myself a poet. Even thought I have had things

I've called poems published in poetry magazines, journals and websites I still feel as though I am - at best – always an apprentice. Although, I was relieved to hear the Australian poet Les Murray once say that he always felt he was working at the limits of his competence when writing a new poem.

I did try out more structured poetry, various fixed stanza forms and made attempts at traditional forms like villanelles, triolets, sonnets an so forth. I found this formal poetry very difficult – but then, so it should be. I found that I often had to bend my thoughts into a shape they would not normally take. Therefore, either the shape was distorted out of all recognition, or the words ended up saying what I didn't originally want them to say. There is the argument that without form then these things may not be poems. But, just as if I tried to alter the shape of them to fit a form they lost a great deal of what I wanted from them, if I tried to turn them into something else - a short story, for example - prose in other words, they did not look right that way either. They wanted to be poems and nothing else.

So, instead, I continued to write free verse feeling that this poetry of a different style - my kind of thing - was free to move in other directions. Poetry for the page, poetry for thought and contemplation - the words remaining significant, essential, carefully chosen, but it is about something else - maybe not narrative, but the creation of a mood, atmosphere, a vision, a contemplative space even, without fixed forms to imprison them they were free to discover something new.

I felt, though, that it is important for poets, all poets, to work with forms - even if they are only exercises that stay inside the notebooks. Just as an artist should learn how to draw, a musician should learn the basics of music and so forth, I thought that a serious poet should take the craft seriously, even though I believed that it was no longer necessary for the work itself to be confined to form to be a real poem.

However, reading The fortunes of formalism, some time ago, and other similar pieces, did bring about a change of heart in me. It made me realise that there is a lot to be said for formalism in poetry. Form gives shape and… well, form to a piece. It goes far wider and deeper than that, though.

Just as in other arts when people have thrown out the rules, they have discovered that total freedom ends up destroying more than just the ‘out-dated forms and structures’, too much freedom often ends up leaving you with just a pile of bricks rather than a useful building. As Robert Frost so famously said ‘Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.’ After all, art is about giving shape and, through that shape, giving meaning to our lives, which otherwise are just one damned thing after another (Elbert Hubbard). Because human beings have a brain that seems predisposed towards looking for patterns (scroll down), it seems that we find satisfaction in structures and narratives and forms. Even Ezra Pound, although a champion of free verse himself, once said ‘Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.’

Since I’ve taken up using more formal structures in my poems I have discovered – to my surprise – that finishing them is far more satisfying than completing a poem in my old way. Back then, in the free-form days I was never really sure if I was done with the thing, never sure if it was finished, complete (insofar as poems are ever really finished). Now, though, with a structure there I can stand back and see that something has been made there on the page. Something like these two pieces (pdf & scroll down).

So, anyway, now I have come to the conclusion that rules, structure and formalism are important. People are story-telling animals and all our stories need a beginning, middle and an end (although, not necessarily in that order – Jean-Luc Godard).

It is not surprising that the peak of free verse happened around the post-60s period. There was then an environment of experimentation and questioning of all rules and regulations, leading to the rules and standards in society becoming looser, freer and more open to question. The breakdown of those rules and strictures, though, lead to this state of affairs, because we have now lost the – mostly unwritten – rules, which taught young people how to behave with adults having authority over them to put them back on the track whenever they stepped off it.

The Left-leaning state which has grown up over the post-war decades, and is now itself a result of and informed by those ideas which reached their peak in the 1960s. It wanted, for the best intentions of course, to destroy the old rules that he believed had been at least partly responsible for the carnages and ravages of the first half of the 20^th Century and create a new – fairer – better – society. Eventually, though, it discovered that without the old rules it needed to create even more new rules because the old rules were organic, growing out of society and its needs, whereas the new rules it created had grown out of theory and idealism and naivety. As it has slowly taken authority away from adults and appropriated it for itself, in a sort of Orwellian inversion of the ‘freedoms’ that the 60s generation in particular were searching for, it has only left people to be ‘free’ in a perpetual never-ending childhood looked after by an overweening state that monitors and controls their every move.

The state constantly pours out its new rules, but these are mostly ineffectual because the state itself has undermined the very structures that made most of these new laws unnecessary. The state’s actions have left us with this free for all, this mere anarchy is loosed upon the world by taking away those – mostly unwritten - rules of everyday life and behaviour. It has replaced them with its own laws that remove authority and structure and form and purpose from the day-to-day world and with a bureaucratic morass of inaction and torpor, driven by targets that have no connection to the ordinary reality of people’s daily lives.

*And - for the sake of argument - we will allow the advertising creative’s imagination to be called an ‘artistic imagination’.

**Again - for the sake of argument - we presume we know what we mean by ‘better’ in this context.

***Whitman was writing free verse in the 19^th century, though, of course.