Bluffers should remember that the slim volume all the critics are raving about today may be on the ‘remaindered’ pile tomorrow. Never commit yourself to reading every issue of every poetry magazine (there are lots in print and squillions online) or checking the poetry shelves of your local bookstore to make sure you haven’t missed a new edition of Poetry Review, Ambit or Magma Poetry.
Let others sift through the bulging granaries of verse, sorting the less bad from the terrible. We are only now learning, or rather deciding, who were the good poets of the 1980s and 1990s, and the jury on poets of the noughties will be out for a good while yet.
Faced with an expert who is parading superior knowledge of contemporary poets, the best path for the bluffer is to be unstintingly admiring: ‘You’re reading all these new apprentices? How brave! I’m afraid it will take me the rest of my life to do justice to the late medieval mnemonics.’ It’s a pretty safe bet that the enthusiast won’t know that by ‘late medieval mnemonics’ you mean ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’.
Like any other subject involving the acquisition and dissemination of vast quantities of knowledge, nobody can ever hope to know everything about poetry. But if you’ve got this far, and you’ve absorbed at least a modicum of the information and advice contained within these pages, then you will almost certainly know more than 99% of the rest of the human race about what poetry is and how you can pretend to know more about it than you do.
What you now do with this information is up to you, but here’s a suggestion: be confident about your newfound knowledge, see how far it takes you, but above all have fun using it. You are now a bona fide expert in the art of bluffing about a rhythmic language of great beauty and emotional sincerity – especially in the hands of the great William Topaz McGonagall (unjustifiably derided as the worst poet in British history).
Think you’re ready to shine with your knowledge of poetry? Test it first with our quiz at bluffers.com.
