Roads go ever on and on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
You will either recognise those lines, or you will not. Or perhaps you half recognise them and could make a reasonable guess as to where they come from. Do you like them? Do they say anything to you beyond their immediate sense? If you recognise them, are you reappraising them now, or falling back on an opinion of them that you see no reason to alter? Do you know who wrote them? And does that knowledge have any bearing on how you feel about them? Are you sure?
The lines are the first stanza of a poem that my wife asked the celebrant to read out at her mother’s funeral shortly after Christmas. It was important to her that the lines were not prefaced with either a title or the name of the poet, and when I asked her why she said that she didn’t want any external information about the poem to distract from the lines themselves; she wanted our friends and family to be able to relate them directly to her mother without encouraging the associations, not to say potentially the prejudice and bias, that come with contextualising labels. This seemed to me quite a profound understanding of what the reader of a piece of literature brings to that work.
The lines are in fact from ‘Bilbo’s Walking Song’ by JRR Tolkien, and they are appropriate to my mother-in-law in ways that only those who knew and loved her could know. Their authorship, their provenance you might say, was at best clutter, at worst misleading in the context where they were spoken in memory of Dorothy.
Here, then, is an example of anonymity as a Good Thing.
We are very used to anonymity as a Bad Thing: online trolls hiding behind their faceless social media accounts; masked riot police beating up an innocent civilian; Ku Klux Klanners marching in torchlight; balaclava-wearing terrorists posing with a terrified civilian. Anonymity in all these cases is a masking of identity, allowing excesses of depravity and cruelty to take place unhindered. If identity is taken away, all humanity goes with it.
Anonymity has always been a way of avoiding punishment or retribution: the masked highwayman, the masked rioter. But it has also been a means of escaping persecution – think of the criminal who comes out of prison and moves to a different part of the country to avoid the stigma his prison sentence has brought within his community – to make a fresh start – a form of anonymity, blending, faceless, into a new crowd. And it has been a form of protection: as in the anonymity guaranteed to the witness identifying a criminal from a line-up.
But what of that thing which could be, although I’m not sure it is, called ‘nymity’, the condition of not being anonymous? Outside of the example of my mother-in-law’s funeral, what is wrong with attaching names to poems? On the face of it, it is innocent and practical enough: if you know the name of the poet, you know who to praise or who to condemn, depending on whether you like or dislike the poem. You know whose work to look for online or in a bookshop, and whose to avoid. Perhaps more importantly, you know who to hold to account if the poem contains language you find offensive, or if it makes you feel uncomfortable, or fearful.
And for the poets themselves, there is the personal kudos from receiving praise and prizes – even if there may also be humiliation in the opposite. This is the gamble the artist makes.
We live in a liberal democracy, which prizes individuals and our freedoms above all things: the freedom to choose, the freedom to own. And a less touted but natural concomitant of these central freedoms, one which has come to sit above them all in our current wealthy, capitalist context, is the freedom to have all our desires sated. We must have satisfaction, constant and complete (why else was Mick Jagger so pissed off?)
And what satisfaction is there for a poet if their poem is published without name or context? Some partial satisfaction in having known you wrote it, a quiet sense of accomplishment perhaps, but not the full-on, 21st century level of satisfaction we’ve come to expect.
Context is important, it’s true. I recently responded to Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones, and a reading of that work without knowing the context of Rees-Jones’s experience of her husband’s death, is very different to one which has that knowledge. It is less rich, the work’s meanings less apparent.
But still, I think there is a case to be made against nymity. And the case comes in two distinct arguments.
The first is as follows: yes, we live in a liberal democracy, but one in which those central tenets of liberal individualism (those concerning the rights of the individual) have become so magnified and distorted that they are out of all proportion with other important aspects of a well-functioning society. For example, the duties of an individual, the flipside of their rights, are all but forgotten in much liberal discourse, often because they are seen as a more conservative ideological component.
Is there, then, room to be made for a cultural space where the individual, their identity, and all their baggage, are left to one side? Might this be part of a movement that begins to redress the balance of this (actually quite precious, for all its faults) liberal democracy? I think there is, although what it would look like I’m not sure. I imagine an online platform where a weekly anonymous poem is shared, and anonymous commenters are welcome to leave their thoughts. A community of poets and readers who know nothing about one another. There may be some rudeness if the poem met with disapproval, but how long would such rudeness last if the nymity of the poem was denied? Where is the fun in trolling if you don’t know who it is you’re trolling? And might, at last, some form of trust ensue?
The second argument comes from a feeling I have that many (perhaps all) of us tend to base our judgements of poems as much on the identity of the poet and what other people have already said about a poem, as we do on the objective ‘thereness’ of the words on the page. This is part of the function of the blurbs on book covers; they’re partly there to sell the book, obviously, but also, I feel, to tell people what to think: oh, X says this is great; then it will be okay for me to think it’s great too. And this focus on context and nymity also leads (I suspect, although I’m not sure I could prove it) to a slightly cowardly tendency of some online reviewers to wait until a collection has been well reviewed by a couple of other critics, so they know whether they are safe to like or dislike it.
As I say, context is important; but there is also a sense in which critics’ views are both formed and then validated by the identity of the poet. A new poem from a much-admired, multiple TS Eliot Prize winner sits in a different spot in a reader’s brain from one by an unknown – or known and disliked – poet. And can we really say we read a poem we know to be written by a man in the same way as one we know to be written by a woman? Likewise race and sexual preference.
There is a fair rebuttal of this argument, which is: of course we read these works differently, and so we should. There is language that is appropriate for some groups and not for others. In fact, you can probably go further and say we need to know as much as we can discover about a poet’s cultural identity so that we have the information we need in order to form an appropriate opinion of their work.
But this argument only goes so far.
The need expressed in the previous paragraph is only a need if your approach to poetry is extractive and judgemental: one in which you ask yourself, ‘What can I take from this work, and what opinion can I form about it?’. But there is another approach, and one I prefer, which where the reader asks: ‘What can I give of myself to this work, and what can I learn from it?’
If I take the second approach, my own identity and context are key, because I cannot escape them. Outside that… there are words; and there is what occurs when those words meet my own particular outlook on the world. This is my reading; and I must ask myself, what happens to my outlook on the world, now I have encountered these words? What aspects of my Self must I open up, and scrutinise, and change? This process could be seen as a gift I receive from the poem and my encounter with it. I am not so much extracting from the words, but in opening myself up to them, they respond by giving themselves to me.
Again, (for the third time) I will emphasise: context and identity are important, and I am not arguing for the above to be the only approach. The relationship between reader and text that I describe does not preclude the context of the poem or the identity of the poet, in fact those things can increase the possibilities of what the reader can learn. But they are not necessary, and if they are missing, other aspects of learning may be allowed to emerge.
Imagine a sonnet appearing in a magazine. Simply that. No name, no title, no explanation. It is just there in the middle of a blank page. I am being asked to consider far more than I would be if poetic identity and context were provided. I have to think about what the poem might mean if it were written by all sorts of different kinds of people. My opinion may now need to be conditional. I will have to live with an element of doubt. In short, I may need to relinquish some control and accept that my understanding of the work can only ever be provisional and contingent.
In our age of constant demands for individual empowerment and control over everything and everyone around us, and the resultant pandemic of unjustified certainty around us, perhaps some small pools of doubt here and there might be things worth having.
Finally, and by way of a coda to this blogpost, my imaged sonnet appearing anonymously in a magazine does assume that the poem, though free from context and nymity, is written by someone. I’ve written about the clear threat posed by AI to poetry elsewhere; but here again is an example where, whether we like it or not, we are going to have to inject a much-needed element of trust into the cultural conversation. If an editor includes a poem in a magazine now, any poem and any magazine, we only have their word that it is what it claims to be and not created using AI. Just as the editor only has the word of the individual who claims to be the poet. I think accepting space for some anonymous poems in contemporary magazines would help build trust by increasing doubt.
And I’ll end on a suitably dramatic note by saying something I truly believe: in poetry there should always be doubt, as non-fixity and multiplicity of meaning is part of what makes it poetry; and where there is doubt there must also be trust. If there is not to be trust in poetry, poetry as an art form will be dead.
Wood Bee Poet 