This wonderful phrase isn't mine I'm afraid, but comes via the Editorial to the latest issue of Poetry Review (published by the Poetry Society). The writer Iain Sinclair appeared on the Radio 4 programme Today to discuss the work of J H Prynne [poem here] and Philip Larkin.
Sinclair... questioned whether such comparisons - Larkin v Prynne - served any purpose beyond a journalistic desire to polarise every issue into a two-party fight. He said "you might as well compare nougat to electricity". The phrase is a good one; neither is fairly judged on the other's terms. Poetry can be very simple, very direct, and memorably rhetorical; it can also be properly difficult, in the senses of complex, intricate, uncoercive, abundant. To pretend it has to be one or the other is to fall into the increasingly unproductive adversarial approach of journalism, with its need for swift reductive judgements and the macho frisson of combat and domination. Poetry, above all the arts, should be
beyond that.
Hear hear - but why limit it to poetry? Why can't we have more journalistic recognition of complexity?
(Originally posted on Panchromatica Too)
