what I did on my holidays

Something is very wrong. Most people who are actively engaged with contemporary poetry either feel that, or refute it, and endless arguments flare up about the state of poetry-buying, or -reading, or -writing, or -teaching. The debate goes in circles and never goes away entirely, no matter whether you're talking about Nielsen's BookData or other more informal information.

Well, I have had a revelation. I wouldn't say it was a road-to-Damascus conversion, but I was writing a review the other day of the "innovative" poet Frances Presley and I suddenly had a thought of such clarity (my first in months) that it might have knocked me off my chair if I hadn't been wedged into the smallest airplane seat in the universe, typing with my nose.

Thinking about it it isn't the most revolutionary revelation, but it did strike me forcibly. I was describing a passage of poetry based on some standing stones on Exmoor - "geo-kinetic" poetry which takes its shape on the page from the poet's experience of the shape of the stone formations, which is non-linear ("non-heirarchical") and which explores the ways in which meaning occupies words. That is, how does it? The poet splits words open (like stones) and uses pieces of them to make word formations.

Now, as I was writing about this I compared the experience of reading it to the experience of looking at paintings. I was in fact thinking of some paintings I saw at Tate St Ives this spring, by a young Cornish painter called Luke Frost. They blew me away, I was really excited by them. I went back and looked at them three times.

You could as easily say reading these poems is like looking at any "pure painting," though - any colour field painting, abstract expressionism, etc. (In the review, which by the way will be published in Poetry London, I cited Barnett Newman as the comparitor.) The aesthetic experience is essentially the same as in looking at a painting. The feeling is the same, and yes: I did find Presley's poems exciting.

Once I thought all this, I looked Luke Frost up on the Tate website. Here, in the notes for the exhibition I saw, is how they describe Frost's work: "Up to ten layers of paint – dependent upon Luke Frost’s selection of colour or tone – result in a surface that recedes into sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, recessive space. These abstract paintings imply space rather than define it through their mass and surface. The juxtaposition of contrasting colour hints at a relationship with nature. Working within the legacy of the St Ives School of Modernists, Frost is attempting to relate colour and form to create a space sensation that conveys a representational experience devoid of gesture and authorship."

Now here are some excerpts from Presley's Statement of Poetics:

"The image also permitted a movement away from the individual subject, the lyric ‘I’: the first person pronoun in this stanza is deceptively omnipresent."

"I, that is ‘she’, have taken compression as far as I can, becoming elliptical and oval (elle), who can’t see the words when she means the woods. It is a compressed line which, I hope, is simultaneously many other compressed lines, of which I can barely hear the echo without special equipment."

"The identity of words constantly shifts and changes within the language and the landscape. Like Harriet Tarlo I am interested in the ‘gaps’ in the landscape, in our lives and in our language and the influence they have on our writing."

"The non-linguistic dimension has to be given space to appear on the page."

So, my revelation is this:

Why the fuck, if the educated and/or pretentious middle classes can flock to galleries to look at paintings and have the aesthetic experience of colour fields and kinetic painting, are they incapable of experiencing the same thing when it's about geo-kinetic language fields?

Even more so, since in my experience as a writer and an editor and working in the public sector, it has come to my attention that everyone seems to think they can write. So language is apparently not arcane, doesn't feel offputting to people in the same way "Art" might. It should be more accessible!

Am I missing something? Of course, not all people are open to visual art, and many people go to galleries without ever knowing what they're looking at: they go, "that's pretty," and leave it at that. But I seems to me that there is more resistance to verbal art than to visual. People are more perplexed, more intimidated.

Is it partly because of all the manifestos and the skinny blokes going on about how alienated they are from the mainstream? (Duh. But FP is not a skinny bloke. And a lot of her poems are very anecdotal, funny, and even heartwarming, if not quite in a way Garrison Keillor might appreciate.)

I'm sure I'm just saying the same thing everyone's been saying for decades; I even have a shadowy feeling of having said similar things myself. But this realisation of having the same kind of response has made me really, really wonder exactly why it is that language-based art is so devalued, when people are clearly - clearly - open to the concept of the same kind of aesthetic experience in other media?!

I include myself in this, of course. I have become very lazy of late, even intellectually moribund. Well, that's over now.