Author: Kirsten Irving

Guidelines to writing a great article. 1.) Research thoroughly. 2.) Redraft substantially and ask for editing advice before publishing it. 3.) Don’t leave writing the article to the night before it has to be posted. 4.) Don’t drink while writing (duh). 5.) If you really have to drink, then at least don’t drink Budweiser. 6.) Don’t swear in the article.

7.) Don’t let your personal bias enter the discussion. Having said that, let’s talk about rock and roll.

The only reason I’m writing about this topic is that I recently noticed the connection (or the particular rift) between rock and poetry. It all goes back to this truth universally acknowledged that rock is dead (or dying, or whatever). I mean, of course it’s been dying since 1959, but now it seems like it might be dying in a more prosaic sense – the rivers of money are drying up. There’s no more of it in the business. Buying music is passé. Heck, it’s an insult: you’re so white that you buy rap music.

In fact, just about the only time the orbit of my life intersects with that of Planet Rock is when someone on Facebook links me to an article on the topic – and they are all the same. It’s always someone taking up a tone that Aeschylus wouldn’t have the nerve to include in his plays, informing us that there is no money (or no popularity, grit, enthusiasm, etc. – because there is no money) in rock and roll anymore. I mean, not only don’t people buy albums anymore – not only aren’t the stars shovelling in the millions – but aspiring rockers can barely cover the expenses for gas money after the tours, and the Monday after the show they have to go back to work! You know, just like normal people! What kind of a rock star is that??

I’d probably be a bit more sensitive if I weren’t imbibing this goddamn Budweiser right now, but reading these kind of complaints, from the point of view of someone who works (ha ha) in the subculture of poetry, my reaction always goes kind of like this guy with the pink background:

(And I’m going to spare myself a full paragraph of self-indulgent examples here by assuming that, if you’re reading this article, you know exactly how much money even the most successful poets can hope to make, and what it means to reconcile that passion with your needs).

So to put this delicately – the doom & gloom from the music industry comes across to me as potentially legitimate and correct, yes, but at the same time completely hilarious. Not because I don’t believe that their (financial) bubble is actually imploding, but because from the position where I work – and where all my friends work – postulating an equation in which the quality of creative work has something to do with your ability to make a living out of it is a JOKE.

It led me to momentarily fantasise what things would be like if poets and rock stars could swap positions – not an unfamiliar exercise, because I suppose that (almost) anyone who ever dreamt of being a poet started out by visualising a guy / gal who has something (not everything, but something) in common with the roaming guitarist. There’s a reason Rimbaud as the original rock star (or prototype punk – he’s a flexible figure) never gets old. Aside from the brilliant poetry, I mean.

Some time ago I wrote an article in which I claimed that having more people in poetry could make it less subtle and intelligent. This was in response to the discontent expressed by poets (parallel to that of rockers) who point out that not enough people read poetry. Be careful what thou wishest for.

So maybe if rock really keeps dying the way that it purportedly is, it’s going to become smarter and more subtle. It could even make people like me interested.

This, however, is the point where the parallel collapses (in part because the Bud is really beginning to go to my head, and I’ve got to start wrapping up the arguments while they still look like arguments). There are many good reasons why rock and poetry will never trade positions. One, just off the top of my head, is that poetry is more ‘pure’ as an art. Rock and roll presupposes an involvement with (if not a commitment to) a certain lifestyle. Lester Bangs didn’t just write about the stuff, he lived it. He did the drugs. He got laid. He buried the bodies. Poetry isn’t cool like that. So many of our best poets are people with utterly boring CVs who conjure incredible worlds only out of their imaginations. There is no cultural script that you have to follow in order to ‘qualify’ as a poet.

Another reason is that poetry is, I think, much better positioned to confront the techno-cultural challenges of a changing world. Rock and roll isn’t losing out to fashion or taste – it’s being killed by globalisation and the internet. Besides, the poetry subculture has the advantage that its representatives DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK about money. If there is, or has ever been, an artistic vocation that cares *less* than poets do about la plata, then I’ve never heard of it. So if anyone told a poet that someone had downloaded his / her book and distributed five-thousand copies of it totally for free, the reaction would be one of unadulterated joy. You got me five-thousand readers, for free?! Heck, we’d probably be encouraging piracy, if it could get more of our stuff out there.

Rock and roll – well, I don’t know if it’s really dead / dying. To be honest I don’t care that much, as I never really listened to it a great deal. I used to have a thing for Metallica and a couple of their offspring when I was sixteen, but I listen to them now and it’s amazing just how crushingly boring all of their songs have become to me. In terms of my personal interest, rock and roll hits an unfortunate middle point – it’s neither as easy as pop and electronica, nor as sophisticated as jazz and classical, meaning that the rewards of investing in it are going to be limited either way.

But even though I don’t know if it is dying, one thing I feel I can say with a certain confidence is that rock is old. I’ll be more precise – rock is no longer a cultural signifier that is associated with youth, and this has nothing to do with the fact that 90% of the major news stories about rockers out there concern some old fart who is releasing his 20^thalbum or who died (I mean, even friggin’ Jack Black in School of Rock was thirty-four years old. That’s well past the age of college shenanigans, man). Even in the nineties, when I was less than ten years old and still reading trashy stuff like, y’know, Conan Doyle and Melville, there was this cultural dichotomy about classical music being for old people and rock ‘n’ roll being for the new generations. It wasn’t because of the relative ages of those who actually listened to it – no, it was the meta-narrative that supported rock and roll from its inception onwards. Now it is that same meta-narrative that has vanished from popular culture (despite still being trumpeted within the corrals of the rock subculture). When you see clichés and stereotypes representing contemporary teens, they’re seldom listening to / talking about rock music. The drugs are still there, of course, and so is the sex (as if…). But the closest thing to a product for young rockers that I recall is something as embarrassing as Freaky Friday, assuming that fantasy can be called rock at all, and that’s a remake of a 1976 film. The rest borders on parody: Guitar Hero is its own popular myth now, and the title itself is tongue-in-cheek.

Poetry doesn’t have an age. It’s always been the stuff that our forebears did, which may be why poetry books only really start selling something once the poet is dead. And that’s why poetry itself can never die.

And hey, maybe rock isn’t dead at all. Maybe it’s just evolved (or in-volved) from a mass phenomenon into a subculture. If that’s the case, then welcome to the club. I’ll buy you a drink with the sum profits of my first four books (whenever I publish them).

Oh, Daniel Radcliffe. I do not envy you. Well actually I do envy you, at least as far as your bank account goes. I’m just being rhetorical for a moment, so please humour me: it must be hard to claw your way out of the well that JK Rowling tossed you into some ten years ago (I forget). Once you were down as Harry Potter, that was it. You tried to get out of it and recast yourself as an actor by making that goofy horror flick that about twelve people went to see (and which includes a poem in the trailer, perhaps prefiguring your upcoming career move), and then you must have realised that Kristen Stewart gathered some decent attention when she went from playing the girl who is cursed with Robert Pattinson (aren’t we all?) to the sixteen-year-old in the American Novel You Read in High School (R). So you followed suit (hopefully not in that you too banged the director of your movie… magic wand, my ass) ( ß Not a directive).

And that’s how I found myself, minutes before enjoying Clooney’s attempts at winning an Oscar by talking to himself inside a helmet, watching a trailer in which you play a tormented schoolboy and his whiny best friend. Harry Potter 9! No wait, it’s about Allen Ginsberg. Unicorns in this one? Considering how much that guy tripped in his time, I wouldn’t be surprised.

(Light that magic wand) ( ßVery much a directive).

Anyway, while we all wait for the release date (by building trenches), I thought it would be a good occasion to continue a series I began a long time ago, when I had both time & beer. Last time I analysed the representation of fictional poets in film. Today I will investigate the representation of real poets in film.

Of course, it would help if I had seen the fucking films before I started writing about them, but I’ve got about seven hours before we’re off schedule and I’ve just stepped off an Easyjet flight in which the captain literally followed the trajectory of a Chinese dragon before landing and I feel like a pair of eggs after they’ve been scrambled. No films right now. Especially not about poetry.

I’ll have to go by what I remember, rather than what I have diligently revised. And we might as well start with the biggest name of them all: William Shakespeare, who stars in the much beloved Shakespeare in Love. I guess a commentary on this one is kind of redundant because there must be about twelve people in all of England who haven’t already seen it (probably the same idiots who went and saw Radcliffe’s The Woman in Black…). I actually quite enjoyed this movie, in spite of its Americanism (that whole thing at the end about her leaving for the new world and thus being his inspiration was as LAME as the Handsome Stranger character in The Villain). It was certainly better than Anonymous, which messes things up because of its overambition – it’s an outlandish enough story without trying to make it into an actual Shakespearean tragedy. At least SIL kind of gets the fun about making a movie about such a universally famous character, and that’s why it is sprent with little references to other people and events from the time. Also, Judi Dench as the Queen rocks. Also also, Gwyneth Paltrow also rocked. Also also also, the guy who played Shakespeare also wasn’t too bad.

To be completely honest I think that’s half the success of the film – that it showed Shakespeare as this handsome young man (certainly more appealing than that goose, De Vere). It gave people what they wanted to see. Of course they’d like it. And in a film like this – in which it is impossible to actually represent The Truth because we’ve got jack on Will in the first place – I think that’s forgivable, and even smarter and more respectable than most of the fictional films about poets.

On the topic of Gwyneth Paltrow – and it’s usually one of my favourite topics, but she kind of spoiled it by making a film about Sylvia Plath, going by the extremely original title of Sylvia.

I must confess I gaped throughout almost the entire thing because I couldn’t wrap my brain around the fact that Sylvia Plath here was *blonde*, while I’d spent my entire adolescence imagining her as a brunette. WTF? Then there’s Daniel Craig playing Ted Hughes (leave it a couple of years and we’d have seen Daniel Radcliffe in the role), before he bench-pressed and girls started saying he was handsome, that is (seriously, what kind of trajectory takes Bond from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig? Who’s going to replace Johnny Depp in the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the lizard from Spiderman?). The whole film struck me as linear and unimaginative – a bit dull, even – and the only scene that really stuck with me was the one where they (Paltrow and Hughes) are on a rowing boat and they seem to get lost. It stuck, I mean, because I too was lost as to what the devil that scene was doing there – it really goes nowhere, just like the characters. But maybe I’m not remembering it correctly. I look forward to seeing the flipside when they make the companion film, hopeful as I am that they will give it a more original title. (God forbid I see Craig’s face on the poster: Ted. I’m almost grateful to MacFarlane for having copyrighted that.)

But execution aside… what happened to Plath’s poetry? The whole film revolves around the relationship between the two poets and so rarely do we actually get a sense of what Plath (or for that matter Hughes) is writing and why. I understand they may have trouble rendering the literature in a film about Dickens (what do you do, read a chapter from Great Expectations?) ( ß I am *this* close to making a joke about why Americans shoot each other in cinemas and getting permanently radiated from the British poetry scene, not to mention arrested… thankfully I’m not drunk enough this time around) but why not a few lines of poetry here and there?

I suppose it was inevitable they would make a film about Rimbaud. If you haven’t seen it, it’s called Total Eclipse. It stars – no less – Leonardo Di Caprio as the unruly French genius, and some other guy with a moustache playing Verlaine. I must say, watching Di Caprio’s early films is very illuminating. He always plays the same part, that of the young, rebellious genius. I thought it worked in Romeo + Juliet, while it got a bit tired in The Basketball Diaries. By the time you get to TE though you can tell that Di Caprio’s young ego was wetting itself all over and this is the whole problem with the film – it’s just Leonardo all over the place, Leo Leo Leo Leo Leo, so dominantly that there is no space for Arthur at all. Like in Sylvia, there’s barely any of his poetry read out. I almost wonder if the actor read any of it, before committing to the part (ok, I’m being insulting, but if Leo read it, he didn’t bring any of it into his performance, or none that I could discern).

On the subject of stars, eclipses, etc. the other inevitable film about the young Romantic poet is Bright Star, about John Keats. I saw this film in bits and pieces in the middle of a holiday in southern Italy, so I was busier eating mozzarella than concentrating on the movie, but I seem to recall this one a bit more affectionately. At least, there’s quite a bit of Keats’ work read out loud, which gives you a sense of what made him so appealing (it may not go in great depth with respects to the content, but it does let you appreciate the lyricism).

What else? Well, there’s Howl, but I haven’t seen that. I’m sure it’s good enough to give Radcliffe a run for his (lots of) money.

Oh what the hell. I’ve done a thousand words. Let’s close it here.