Occasions for Solidarity: Ashbery, Riley, and the Tradition of the New

Abstract

There were few English poems Donald Davie liked less than Thomas Hardy's 'The Darkling Thrush'. Published in The Times on 1 January 1900, and written to mark the arrival of the new century, it was a poem, as Davie saw it, which anticipated all that was worst about twentieth-century British poetry. The defining quality of such 'occasional poems', he argued, was that they 'cannot give offence', and Hardy's readiness to write them was thus symptomatic of that 'decent liberalism' which represented his 'crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors'.[1] Hardy's tendency, that is, to rise 'dutifully to public occasions' was for Davie cause for considerable regret (p. 36). But so too was Charles Tomlinson's belief, 'There is no occasion too small for the poet's celebration.' It was a belief, Davie complained, 'naturally at home in a society that makes no distinction between small occasions and big ones, a society that resists any ranking of certain human and civic occasions below or above certain others', such a society being, as he observed, a 'social democracy'.[2] There was, in other words, a conflict in Davie's thinking on this matter: to write in recognition of large public occasions being to show a liberal's lack of ambition, while to honour small occasions was to acquiesce to the social democratic impulse. It was a conflict that went to the root of Davie's criticism. He could not see how any occasion coloured by democracy could be fit for poetic attention, because he was unsure how, if at all, poetry and democracy could be thought compatible. The problem was hardly a new one. Writing a century before Davie in Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman observed: Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions.[3] Same problem; different spin. Whitman, like Davie, wonders how the poet can meet the requirements of democratic occasions, but thinks that to do so would be no modest achievement. On the contrary, it is 'our fundamental want today', and the poet who satisfies it will glory in a status higher than any yet known. The purpose of this article is to up-date these arguments and, with Whitman's exhortation in mind, to dispute Davie's suggestion that the idea of such a democratic poet is self-contradictory. Through the work of Denise Riley and John Ashbery and, in a theoretical coda, through the twin philosophical traditions of pragmatism and speech-act theory, I will consider what it now means, at the end of another century, to speak of democratic occasions, arguing that it is poetry attuned to the tradition of the avant-garde which is most fit, to borrow Whitman's expression, to cope with such occasions. There are compelling reasons for considering Denise Riley's writing in this connection. For a start, she is profoundly concerned with questions of democracy. Indeed one way of reading her most recent collection Mop Mop Georgette is as a beautifully rigorous, dialectical meditation on the possibility of democratic poetry; sometimes, as in 'Knowing in the Real World', echoing Davie ('There's no democracy in beauty'), but more often than not, as in 'Red Shout', striving to find the means to refute him: I still wait for a really human sign as light and shocking as an annunciation -- sometimes I get it and in democratic form: Red Shout.[4] That Riley takes the relation of poetry to democracy so seriously would seem one reason for the good press she has been receiving of late. For John Kerrigan, writing in the TLS, her 'stylish, demotic wit counters any suspicion that British experimental verse must be hieratic'.[5] Nigel Wheale approves the fact that her poetry has 'no recurrent default mechanism to any one characteristic locale, no fall-back to pastorale, or remorselessly emphatic advance to inner-city vanguardism';[6] while 'A note by Douglas Oliver' carried on the cover of Mop Mop Georgette announces: 'POETRY'S FUTURE probably lies in the direction Denise Riley is taking and many of us read her work to find out how to do it [. …