Anapests Enow

On Len Pennie, and poetic value

The Times’s reviewer Graeme Richardson, excoriating the young Scottish poet Len Pennie, remarks that

Pennie’s main literary weapon is anapestic tetrameter. So here we are, as in many a parish magazine, or local newspaper, with the rhythm and rhyme of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas …”. This is fine for kids’ or comic verse. But Pennie sees herself as a serious thinker, a raiser of consciousness about evil in our world, especially misogyny.

Anapestic tetrameter is also the metre of the livelier sections of The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York (“they’ve got CARS big as BARS, they’ve got RIVers of GOLD”), where it is matched to a jig-like melodic line. Neither kids’ nor comic verse exactly, but the way Shane McGowan’s lyric plays the jaunt of the meter against the harshness of a lovers’ quarrel (“you scumbag, you maggot” and so on) depends for its effect on the knowing incongruity of the pairing. For a well-loved festive hit record, Fairytale is violently ambivalent, conveying both the near-certainty that the couple depicted aren’t going to make it, and a gauzily luminous sense that even prolix sentimentality conjured from the dregs of a bottle has something indefatigably human and hopeful about it.

So the question of whether Pennie (or any writer) can succeed as a “serious thinker” in such a form is more complicated than I think Richardson allows. To be clear, I don’t think she’s attempting anything like what McGowan accomplishes in Fairytale. For one thing, the latter is a dialogue, in which two voices challenge, undermine, accuse, and attempt to mollify and console each other. Pennie’s verse is typically monologic: it most often articulates a single point of view, presumptively that of its author. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that a voice which earnestly has important things to say on its own behalf chooses to say them in a way which might seem to undercut its self-seriousness. Discomforting, in fact. And rather than abiding with that discomfort, I think Richardson hastily metabolises it as aesthetic failure, and resorts to the assumption that incompetence and lack of self-awareness are to blame.

Another thing that anapestic metre lends itself to is a sort of headlong energy-rush. The Night Before Christmas has

As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too -

— a thrilling “whoosh!” which relies on sheer momentum to ride out the considerable syntactic weirdness of the way its clauses¹ are arranged. Pennie’s verse tends towards a one-thought-per-couplet organisation, where the thought is typically some sort of contrast between what’s presented in the first line of the couplet and what succeeds it in the second: “Your futile words fail to console / those serving life without parole”. It’s a poetry of regular cadence, geared to a performance context in which the speaker is on a short leash. But one might say the same of, for example, Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress — “the grave’s a fine and private place / but none I think do there embrace” — which builds its case for “tear[ing] our pleasures with rough strife / through the iron gates of life” through a methodical barrage of witty clause-pairs.

The point I am driving towards is that the verses in Pennie’s poyums annaw operate in a remarkably constrained environment. Far from being limited by their chosen form’s associations with light or comic verse, they limit themselves to do less than that form affords. This is a poetry which mostly avoids surprise: few “farouche lexical outrages”² here, or looping syntactical excursions into obliquity, or dramatic ironies and uncertainties discovered in the weave of conflicting voices.

That is not to say that it is without technical effects: there are some clever end-rhymes split across words, like the “iambic” / “I am thick” to which Richardson draws attention in his review, and some wrong-footing enjambments, where a phrase that might plausibly have ended at the line-end continues unexpectedly beyond it. A strong example of the latter can be found in “Face”:

And I can't take my eyes off the face staring back,
As I scrutinise every ideal that I lack -
Every blemish, each wrinkle, each fine line, each pore;
I like myself less when I start to weigh more
Than I did at sixteen, when I used to eat sleep
For my dinner...

“I like myself less when I start to weigh more” could have ended the sentence (rather patly) right there; the continuation into “…Than I did at sixteen” instead dramatically deepens the predicament, and “when I used to eat sleep / For my dinner” contains a rare surprising, and sharply poignant, word-choice. This is the sort of thing that I, being me, think is good; and most of poyums annaw is not good in this sort of way. But, more than that, I think it deliberately — wilfully — eschews “being good” in this sort of way as a guiding ambition.

So it seems worth asking, as Richardson does not, what aesthetic and ethical choices are being made here. He describes Pennie as feigning artlessness as a pose to gain “likes” on social media, essentially blaming the incentive structure of the public arena, and the author’s weak-minded surrender to its prerogatives, for a simplicity that comes off as inauthentic. Surely, no educated person (“Pennie, in fact, has a master’s from St Andrews in Spanish language and literature”) would want to write like this. The decision to do so is received by him as a calculated affront to the values imparted by education itself.

I write, as an “educated person”, under several assumptions about what writing “should” try to be and do. It should reckon with the contexture, and also the inertia, of what surrounds it and what has gone before. It should favour surprise, even at the cost of obscurity, over the transparent (if persuasive) articulation of the bleeding obvious. In other words, it should perform distinction: demonstrable awareness of the cultural background from which it separates itself, and demonstrable tact and novelty in accomplishing that separation. This is obviously not a game you can expect to play well if you have not either been invested in by the education system as a suitable bearer of human capital, or through exceptional autodidact labour brought yourself up to scratch as a serious contender.

Most people from this point of view are “civilians”, non-players, quite outside the game. They have the inalienable right to have a go at scribbling a few verses in rhyming couplets when there’s a funeral or something, and it would be quite unfair to subject their efforts to hard critical scrutiny when they do, but equally they have no business getting published, let alone receiving the acclaim of large audiences. When an educated poet such as Pennie writes poetry that does not perform distinction, that cleaves closely to the form and manner of speaking that “civilians” reach for when they resort to verse, they can only be grifting for attention.

That is the way my knee wants to jerk, too: it is discomforting to have things that I have learned to value about myself treated by a celebrated young writer as simply bypassable. But projects of radical decluttering of diction are also a perennial feature of our literary heritage; Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads is precisely that. Moreover, Pennie’s writing in Scots (which Richardson strangely and symptomatically ignores completely) shows a marked affection for, and solidarity with, a manner of speaking that nobody is ever taught to value about themselves. (I think it is often better, in the ways that I care about, than her writing in English, although it may just be that it satisfies my craving for unfamiliarity because the dialect is not everyday speech for me).

Now you may say of the Lyrical Ballads that however simplified their diction they are immensely carefully fashioned, that the labour of simplification was itself non-trivial and bore significant ethical weight. All of this is a way of disclaiming spontaneity as a value, which is ironic given Wordsworth’s own declaration that poetry should be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (or, say, Keats’s assertion that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”). However, creating the conditions under which true spontaneity is possible may require significant preparation. In Pennie’s case, the discipline of performance, of presenting work in a digital forum where attention can be snatched away the moment the viewer’s interest wanes, creates its own distinct pressures, which I think can be felt in the lines as written. If her poems often say things her audience may be expected to agree with without having to think about them very much — may, in fact, have been waiting to hear someone say loudly and melodiously, so that they can express delighted and communally-validating approval — this may be an artefact of the feedback loop within which they were shaped.

It is also worth placing the things Pennie is vocally uninterested in — judgements of “good” and “bad” in the matter of poetry — in the context of the very pressing themes in her work of domestic abuse, femicide, and male impunity for crimes which strike at the heart of survivors’ sense of self. There is a repeated demand in poyums annaw for some combination of voluntary personal commitment to act against such violence, and political awareness of the structural magnitude of its enabling conditions. The trouble here is that nobody, and I mean nobody, knows how to connect up the two things. The perverse and gleeful sadism of the abuser is vividly conjured, but what structural remedy can there be for such unfathomable personal malignancy? The incompetencies of the court system, and the prevalence of social attitudes that minimise male accountability for crimes against women, are rightly denounced, but what within the scope of individual decision and action could meaningfully shift the dial on such matters? The mediating term, which might draw these concerns together, is a social movement which in our fragmentary times exists neither in imagination nor in actuality. Pennie’s poetry cries out, I think sometimes contradictorily, for something that has yet to cohere.

In contrasting the monologism of Pennie’s verse with the dialogic style of Shane McGowan’s Fairytale of New York, I am comparing a song which places male and female voices in active contention, and notably gives the last word to the male speaker, with poetry that urgently needs to suspend the inclusive relativism of “he said, she said” and give, uninterrupted, the survivor’s version of events. Literary irony, ambiguity, contextual tact, symbolic compression and allusiveness are all potentially inimical to the need to testify plainly, which may well entail loudly stating the bleeding obvious in the teeth of sophisticated gaslighting. There is a danger, for those of us who value about ourselves our fluency with what literature can do with words, of instead treating this kind of testimonial urgency as an assault upon our values. If you find yourself feeling strongly this way, you should probably give your head a wobble.

1. No pun intended.

2. “farouche lexical outrages” is from an admiring review quoted on the jacket of a volume of poetry by the late Sir Geoffrey Hill.