Yellow Iron [antikvár]

IntroductionWe have, of course, learned to question literature and rightly so: but despite our questions we are aware that there is something substantial there to question, something determined by, but not to be described in terms of, intention. Even now, in what we think of, perhaps rather selfconsciously, as the postmodern period, the categories: fiction, poetry, drama etc. have not been drained of value. We still embark upon a poem with some idea of the enterprise we have undertaken. There are people who actively dislike that enterprise, for moral, or even for aesthetic reasons. One day we had been discussing a poem by W.H.Auden. Afterwards a gifted student told me that she disliked, "the poetry-ness of poetry". She preferred, she said, Irvine Welsh's 'Trainspotting' to any amount of Auden. It was as if I could hear her voice a long way down a corridor but I could see what she meant. She meant she distrusted the airs that literature appears to give itself. I recognized it in myself. She didn't like literature knowing it was literature. She disliked its fine distinctions. She distrusted its artifice. I remembered Marianne Moore's poem, called 'Poetry' which begins, 'I too dislike it ' Well, of course. One has to dislike it too. Then one has to see its necessity and fall in love with its necessities all over again, to feel its power as Renton feels the drug-rush in 'Trainspotting'. Would I personally swop Auden for 'Trainspotting'? Absolutely not. But there are perhaps moments when one might actually hate Auden and Plath and Dante and even Shakespeare and these moments might in themselves be moments of literature, if you see what I mean. In our heart of hearts we know there is a kind of difference between Franz Schubert's String Quintet and a goal by Alessandro Del Piero, in the same way as we can tell the difference between the USA and Disneyland, but it does us no harm to bear in mind that the hierarchy is brittle, and that some might prefer the smell of the football crowd to the scents in the concert hall.As a poet, I have been engaged in the teaching of creative writing for the last ten years or so, and beyond that too if I take short courses and lectures into consideration. Teaching creative writing, as opposed to